Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/132

 and the broad-topped pines of the Villa Pamfili, The place was crumbling and shabby and sinister, but the river was delightful, the rent a trifle and everything romantic. Roderick was in the best humour with his quarters from the first, and was certain that the faculty of production would be intenser there in an hour than in twenty years at Northampton. His studio was a large empty room with a vaulted ceiling where the vague dark traces of an old fresco caused Rowland, whenever he spent an hour with his friend, to stare at it for some faint survival of floating draperies and clasping arms. Roderick had housed his personal effects economically in the same quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in Rowland's more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches and gardens.

Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace close to the fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air of leisurely permanence. He had the habits of a collector; he spent half his afternoons ransacking the dusky magazines of the curiosity-mongers, and he often made his way in quest of a prize into the heart of impecunious Roman households which had been prevailed upon to listen—with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile—to proposals for an hereditary "antique." In the evening often, under the lamp, amid dropped curtains and the scattered gleam of firelight upon 98