e friend,
devoted to complicity, but also to heroism, entered the vast room, he
could see at the first glance that he had been mistaken and that no sound
of voices had reached that peaceful retreat.

The atelier of the American painter was furnished with a harmonious
sumptuousness which real artists know how to gather around them. The
large strip of sky seen through the windows looked down upon a corner
veritably Roman--of the Rome of to-day, which attests an uninterrupted
effort toward forming a new city by the side of the old one. One could
see an angle of the old garden and the fragment of an antique building,
with a church steeple beyond. It was on a background of azure, of verdure
and of ruins, in a horizon larger and more distant, but composed of the
same elements, that was to arise the face of the young girl, designed
after the manner, so sharp and so modelled, of the 'Pier della
Francesca', with whom Maitland had been preoccupied for six months.

All great composers, of an originality more composite than genitive, have
these infatuations.

Maitland was at his easel, dressed with that correct elegance which is
the almost certain mark of Anglo-Saxon artists. With his little varnished
shoes, his fine black socks, spotted with red, his coat of quilted silk,
his light cravat and the purity of his linen, he had the air of a
gentleman who applied himself to an amateur effort, and not of the
patient and laborious worker he really was. But his canvases and his
studies, hung on all sides, among tapestries, arms and trinkets, bespoke
patient labor. It was the history of an energy bent upon the, acquisition
of a personality constantly fleeting. Maitland manifested in a supreme
degree the trait common to almost all his compatriots, even those who
came in early youth to Europe, that intense desire not to lack
civilization, which is explained by the fact that the American is a being
entirely new, endowed with an activity incomparable, and deprived of
traditional saturation. He is not born cultivated, matured, already
fashioned virtually, if one may say so, like a child of the Old World. He
can create himself at his will. With superior gifts, but gifts entirely
physical, Maitland was a self-made man of art, as his grand father had
been a self-made man of money, as his father had been a self-made man of
war. He had in his eye and in his hand two marvellous implements for
painting, and in his perseverence in developing a still