At first, he was painting with a model, and the model was a little Italian boy, and that was the most fun to see, because the artist’s arranging him was interesting. He worked quickly those nights, and not very long. . . . Then came his working alone, and--what Leslie would have called, “Real _drama_, my dear!” For more than once I saw him stand away from his canvas, and study it in a way that told me he didn’t think it right. . . . And once he dropped his palette on a table, flung himself down in a chair and dropped his head in his hands. I can’t describe how interested I got in that picture and in the artist. I liked him even then--which does seem silly--but I did, and although I had never seen him enough closely to know his face, nor, of course, the picture, I felt that I must go tell him that it was _fine_, and that he mustn’t be discouraged! I reached the point--and after only a little time of looking into his work room--of talking half aloud, and saying all the things I wanted to say right to him. “It’s _really_ good,” I would say, “you _mustn’t_ get discouraged! What do you do with that stick you hold?” Of course he didn’t answer, but it helped me, and I will say here that when any one is miserable from thinking of the kind of noise that they are used to at home, and the way their mother looks when she sits by the table with the drop light on it, mending, it is a good thing to get _really_ interested in some one else! I know. I speak from experience! That was the way the first week went; the second one started out with the most interesting experience, and it ended with another one--and one that I never, at that point, would have imagined _could_ be! But Fate has a great many little knots in her threads which make her change the pattern as she weaves, and Viola’s dislike of sickness, and being with sick people, made Fate pause, then take a stitch and--draw me close to Leslie! I reckoned time, quite naturally, not with the start of a calendar week, but from the day that I took my lesson. And it was on Wednesday, at five on a rainy afternoon, just after my second lesson that I came up the Via Tornabuoni all alone, stopped to buy three cream puffs, and then thought I’d step into the Duomo which almost fills the big Piazza del Duomo, and from its dome looks not only over all the city but far off to the hills. It was hazy inside, for incense was floating, but the chill of the outside air that had come with the rain was gone, and the candles on the big altar made a pretty bright yellow blotch in the center of all the gray.