I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon in Chicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled from Nora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doing something that would bring me in a little money. What should I do? The devil! It was apparent I would soon have to go to work again with my hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft and velvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to hold a pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, I fancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approach the arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permitted me to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth with its all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and with its noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the most glorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thought often of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was just coming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What glorious children! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo de Lancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of the Sacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? What a place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of the coronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day before four mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s house to the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilege of the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinal when he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, that the vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearing he might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperate fellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the old city at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at any moment make any one of them rich and powerful, a patron of the arts, a rich and powerful grandee of Church or State. How I longed to be a richly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron of the arts!