York, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, looking for new
contracts. They have trotted about the globe as though the whole world
were home to them. They have spent a week in a train or a month on a
steamer, to get back to their corner in the Gallery. Nothing has
changed, for all of their distant rambles. They take their usual table.
They renew their old intrigues, their old gossip, their old jealousies,
as if they had been gone a day. They stand around in front of the
show-windows with an air of proud disdain, like princes traveling
incognito, but unable quite to conceal their exalted station. They tell
about the ovations accorded them by foreign audiences. They exhibit the
diamonds on their fingers and in their neckties. They hint at affairs
with great ladies who offered to leave home and husband to follow them
to Milan. They exaggerate the salaries they received on their trip, and
frown haughtily when some unfortunate "colleague" solicits a drink at
the nearby Biffi. And when the new contracts come in, the mercenary
nightingales again take wing, indifferently, they care not whither. Once
more, trains and steamers distribute them, with their conceits and their
petulances, all over the globe, to gather them in again some months
later and bring them back to the Gallery, their real home--the spot to
which they are really tied, and on which they are fated to drag out
their old age.

Meantime, the _pariahs_, those who never arrive, the "bohemians" of
Milan--when they are left alone console themselves with tales of famous
comrades, of contracts they themselves refused to accept, pretending
uncompromising hauteur toward impresarios and composers to justify their
idleness; and wrapped in fur coats that almost sweep the ground, with
their "garibaldis" on the backs of their heads, they hover around
Biffi's, defying the cold draughts that blow at the crossing of the
Gallery, talking and talking away to quiet the hunger that is gnawing at
their stomachs; despising the humble toil of those who make their living
by their hands, continuing undaunted in their poverty, content with
their genius as artists, facing misfortune with a candor and an
endurance as heroic as it is pathetic, their dark lives illumined by
Hope, who keeps them company till she closes their eyes.

Of that strange world, Rafael had caught a glimpse, barely, during the
few days he had spent in Milan. His companion, the canon, had run across
a former chorister from the cathedr