“Oh, very _much_!” I stated. Mr. Wake smiled down at me then--I didn’t know quite why--but I liked it; it gave me something of the same warm feeling that came from the almost piercing sunlight, and then Mr. Wake took my hand and drew my arm through his as he had done before. “The devil take Signora Grundy,” he said, “I have no use for her at all, and never had! And how--” (he stopped and coughed and finished with a jerk) “is the fairy godmother?” “Very well,” I answered. “Some day,” he said, “you’ll describe her to me? Faith, and I never will get enough of some fairy tales!” “I will,” I promised. And then Mr. Wake went on to tell me of Sam Deane, and I was glad to hear his story. Sam Deane, who was twenty-eight, Mr. Wake said, had won a traveling scholarship from a well-known art school in the middle west. This had meant a year in Paris and a thousand dollars allowance beside, and it was given as a reward for exceptionally good work. Well, Sam Deane had come to Paris and worked his year, and then he decided that he wanted what Mr. Wake said Sam termed “A go at Rome and Florence,” so he packed his suitcase, tucked his banjo under his arm and walked most of the way to Rome. And Mr. Wake put in the statement that Sam was the sort who could get what he really wanted, and I said I thought so too, and then Mr. Wake smiled down at me again in his very pleasant, twinkling, warming way which led me to believe that the weather made him feel well, too. Sam Deane did well in Rome where he looked up some of his fellow workers, and shared a beautiful studio that was set high in a bit of the old Roman City wall. He got some orders and saw the place, and he stayed there quite a while and began to feel that Fortune was really fond of him. But in Florence! Oh, that was a different story! The haughty city turned her back on him, and she closed her long, slim fingers round her gold. And Mr. Wake said that Sam had been duped by the worst scoundrel of an agent that ever lived, and that there was nothing wrong with the picture Sam was copying, not in the _manner_, Mr. Wake stated. (He said the subject was ghastly, I don’t know why, I thought the little boy would have made a pretty picture, but when you are educated in Art I don’t believe you want them to be pretty) Anyway, the agent kept putting Sam off, and making him redo his work, for he had a clause in his contract order that let him do this. And Mr. Wake said that in this way Signor Bianco usually reduced his slaves to such despair that they finally let their work go to him for half its real worth.