But when I was in my first teens the Great Salvini came, and with him a son. They played _The Three Musketeers_, in what popular pride, somewhat feeble in fact, called the Opera House. The dramatic production here was of slight importance to them. What they really came for was to go quail hunting in the Indian Territory. My father, as it happened, was the best wing-shot in the State. I had inherited a little of his ability; I was permitted to go along. The two Italians were impressed with the eloquence, the space-surprise of the unmarked land-levels, where roads were just anywhere you wished to go, and the sweep of light unimpeded. I was impressed with the beauty, the charm of the young Italian. In addition to genius, there was upon him the seal of an ancient rich, finely tempered living. The winter that followed I was in a university in the north, lonely and homesick for the sun, for the south. Then I saw that Salvini was billed. After the first performance I went behind the scenes to renew acquaintance with my gay hunting companion of the autumn. This was the beginning of a week of delight such as my child’s soul had not known, a week when I saw daily this engaging Italian youth, so unlike the young men of the plains whom I had known. I, who even then, was peculiarly sensitive to beauty, was all but stricken dumb by this alluring personality. I sensed the splendid things he had known which were unknown to me. When at length he had to go away, I wept. He was beauty and youth and love and charm. He was all the things I liked and dumbly wanted. What remained was the snow-bound, duty-filled Michigan winter, where day was too short, too quickly black-rimmed with dusk and night. As in the case of Adonis of old, beauty was dead and my heart was lamenting. Years passed. Life like an uncontrollable tidal-wave swept in, bearing the things I hated or had no interest in. In short, I grew old with the years. Then, one night in New York, in a little moving-picture theatre on a cheap side street, one night of winter, when the snow outside was deeply white, just as it used to be by black forest edges, in those long forgotten Michigan winters, I saw laughing down upon me from the silver screen, in a luxurious Roman garden-scene from _Quo Vadis_, a face I seemed to have known. What dimly remembered delight was there! In the eyes, mouth, the careless gesture of the head, the trained grace of hands! It was the face of a man no longer in his first youth, but keeping still youth’s slenderness, youth’s lines. A face more eloquent, made more impassioned and moving by the years, and crowned with the flowers I always loved, the fragile flowers of an Italian spring. The background was an old, rich garden of the south, and beyond—the Immortal City, _Rome_. Into the eyes as they looked upon me crept a look I seemed to remember. _Salvini!_