After lunch I had two more hours of practising and then I could do as I liked again. Sometimes I walked--always if I hadn’t in the morning--and sometimes I read or wrote, and once in a while Miss Meek asked me to play “draughts,” by which she meant checkers, or Miss Bannister would call me in her room to show me some old, faded, once brown, now yellowing photographs of the house where she had lived as a girl, and where her father, who had been “The Vicar,” had died. And I always said they were _beautiful_, and she would nod, and keep on nodding for quite a while, and point out the vine that her mother had planted, and the place where her father sat under the trees and read his books, and the spot where she and her little sister, who was dead, had had their dolly parties. I think she enjoyed doing it, and I was so glad that I could look at the photographs and say that they were _lovely!_ and ask her little questions which she seemed to like answering. Dinner and the evenings were all about the same, with Mr. Hemmingway “a-hemming” and trying to remember, and Miss Meek barking out “Oh, lud!”, or asking Leslie how “Lady Vere de Vere” was this evening? And Miss Bannister squeaking out questions and then telling whoever answered them that she didn’t care what they said. And “not to bother, please--” and then--my room, for Leslie and Viola were very thick at that time--and they wouldn’t have included me in any of their plans, even if I had let my pride weaken and let them see that I was a little lonely sometimes. Of course I knew that I was in Florence to work, and that I was the luckiest girl in the world to be there, and I told myself that _over_ and _over_ again! But a person’s heart will go on feeling just as it wants to--in spite of all the person’s reasoning and sense--and I must admit that some of those hours after dinner found me--well, not _exactly_ happy. I think I really would have been pretty close to the edge of honestly real misery if it hadn’t been for my Artist, who was working a good deal at night. After I’d snapped on my electric light, which only lit the center of the great big room and made deep shadows behind each piece of furniture and turned the corners into inky blotches, I used to go to my window. If my artist were working, I’d go back to the electric turn, switch it off, and then cross the room again, scramble up to sit on the sill, rub my shins, for I always seemed to hit something in crossing! and--watch.