It was simply the usual big Continental _cafe_, but to me as new and strange as everything else in the wonderful life in the wonderful world into which I had strayed from the old familiar ways of Philadelphia, with a long halt between only in England where the _cafe_ does not exist. To the marble-topped tables, the gilding, mirrors and plush, novelty lent a charm they have never had since and probably would soon have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as it seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the youthful enthusiastic Roman cyclist we had picked up in Montepulciano, cycled with through the Val di Chiana on a sunny October Sunday, and run across again in Rome where he amiably showed us the hospitality of the capital by occasionally drinking coffee with us at our expense, and by once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro himself was impressed and joined us again, later on the same evening, to explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen's hair-dresser unawares. Foreigners did not often find their way into the _Nazionale_. They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as women in Rome never dined,--or so I gathered from my observations at the _Posta_, the _Falcone_ and the _Cavour_,--they never drank coffee. Only on Sundays would they descend upon the _cafe_ with their husbands and children, and then it was to devour ices and cakes at a rate that convinced me they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When I asked for the _Times_--they took the _Times_ at the _Nazionale_--the waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the _Signore Tedesco_ has it," and the _Signore Tedesco_, a mild German student who for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any table save our own. And yet at ours, before I could say how it came about, a little group collected, and every evening in the furthest room J. and I began to hold an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn tweeds of cycling and not bother because we were not dressed; we could welcome our friends the more cordially because, as we did not provide the entertainment, it was no offence to us if they did not like it, nor to them if we failed to sit it out. In the _cafe_ we found the "oblivion of care," the same "freedom from solitude," though not the big words to express it, which Dr. Johnson "experienced" in a tavern. Were all social functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be half the strain it is upon everybody's patience and good-nature and purse.