ation, with his natural and acquired
refinement, placed him on a higher level than the majority of other
Roman artists, who, in the Rome of that day, inhabited a Bohemia of
their own which has completely disappeared. Their ideas and
conversation, when they were serious, interested him, but their manners
were not his, and their gaiety was frankly distasteful to him. He
associated with them as an artist, but not as a companion, and he
particularly disliked their wives and daughters, who, in their turn,
found him too 'serious' for their society, to use the time-honoured
Italian expression. Nevertheless, his natural gentleness of disposition
made him treat them all alike with quiet courtesy, and when, as often
happened, he was obliged to be in their company, he honestly endeavoured
to be one of them as far as he could.

On the other hand, he had no footing in the society to which Francesca
belonged, but for which she cared so little. There were, indeed, one or
two houses where he was received, as he was at Casa Braccio, in a manner
which, for the very reason that it was familiar, proved his social
inferiority--where he addressed the head of the house as 'Excellency'
and was called 'Reanda' by everybody, elders and juniors alike, where he
was appreciated as an artist, respected as a man, and welcomed
occasionally as a guest when no other outsider was present, but where he
was not looked upon as a personage to be invited even with the great
throng on state occasions. He was as far from receiving such cold
acknowledgments of social existence as those who received them and
nothing else were distantly removed from intimacy on an equal footing.

He did not complain of such treatment, nor even inwardly resent it. The
friendliness shown him was as real as the kindness he had received
throughout his early youth from the Prince of Gerano, and he was not the
man to undervalue it because he had not a drop of gentle blood in his
veins. But his refined nature craved refined intercourse, and preferred
solitude to what he could get in any lower sphere. The desire for the
atmosphere of the uppermost class, rather than the mere wish to appear
as one of its members, often belongs to the artistic temperament, and
many artists are unjustly disliked by their fellows and pointed at as
snobs because they prefer, as an atmosphere, inane elegance to inelegant
intellectuality. It is often forgotten by those who calumniate them that
hereditary elegan