It was nearly three o'clock, and there were few customers in the Asolando. At the next table two women were engaged in conversation in the subdued tones the place compelled. I surmised from the amount and variety of their impedimenta and their abstracted air, peculiar to those who partake of lobster salad with an eye on the 4.18, that they were suburbanites. One of them drew from her net shopping-bag several sheets of robin's-egg blue note-paper and began to read. By the jingle of the rhymes and the flow of the rhythm it was clear even to my ignorant lay mind that her offering was a _chant-royale_. When she had concluded her reading her friend silently pressed her hand, and after a subdued debate for possession of the check, they took their departure, bound, I surmised, for some muse-haunted Lesbos among the hills of New Jersey. I was now alone in the Asolando. The attending deities in their snowy gowns had vanished behind the screen at the rear of the room; the food and drink with which I had been promptly served proved excellent; even the minor poet in green and gold had held my attention, though imitations of Coventry Patmore's odes bore me as a rule. Near the street, half-concealed behind a mosque-like grill, sat the cashier, reading. A bundle of joss-sticks in a green jar beside this young woman sent a thin smoke into the air. Her head was bent above her book in quiet attention; the light from an electric lamp made a glow of her golden hair. She was an incident of the general picture, a part of a scene that contained no jarring note. A man who could devise, in the heart of the great city, a place so instinct with repose, so lulling to all the senses, was not less than a public benefactor, and I resolved on the spot to purchase and read, at any sacrifice, the sonnet-sequences of the reputed angel of the Asolando.