e in Rome. Peasant men and women slept, when they
slept, in and beneath carts and huge wine-wagons camped and parked in
stone forests of imperial ruins. Artisan, mechanic, and merchant Rome
lightened toil and went upon the hunt for pleasure, dropping servility
in the first ditch. Foreigners, artists, men from everywhere, roved,
gazed, and listened, shared. The great made displays, some with
beauty, some of a perverted and monstrous taste. The lords of the
Church nodded, looked sleepily or alertly benevolent. At times all
alike turned mere populace. Courtesans thronged, the robber and the
assassin found their prey. All men and women who might entertain, ever
so coarsely, ever so poorly, were here at market. Mummers and players,
musicians, dancers, jugglers, gipsies, and fortune-tellers floated
thick as May-flies. Voices, voices, and every musical instrument--but
all set in a certain range, and that not the deep nor the sweet. So it
seemed, and yet, doubtless, by searching might have been found the
deep and the sweet. Certainly the air of heaven was sweet, and it went
in and between.

All who might or who chose went masked. So few did not choose that
street and piazza seemed filled with all orders of being and moments
of time. Terrible, grotesque, fantastic, pleasing, went the rout, and
now the hugest crowd was here and now it was there, and now there were
moments of even diffusion. At night the lights were in multitude, and
in multitude the flaring and strange decorations. Day and night swung
processions, stood spectacles, huge symbolic movements and attitudes,
grown obscure and molded to the letter, now mere stage effects. Day
by day through carnival week the noise increased, restraint lessened.

At times Ian was in company with monseigneur and those who came to the
villa; at times he sought or was sought by others that he knew in
Rome, fared into carnival with them. Much more rarely he dipped into
the swirl alone.

The saturnalia drew toward its close. Ash Wednesday, like a great
gray-sailed ship, was seen coming large into port. The noise grew
wild, license general. All available oil must be poured into the fire
of the last day of pleasures. Ian was to have been with monseigneur's
party gathered to view a pageant lit by torches of wax, then to drink
wine, then, in choice masks, to break in upon a dance of nymphs, whirl
away with black or brown eyes.... It was the program, but at the last
he evaded it, slipped from