Marion Crawford was living at Sorrento with his wife and four children. He had become famous and, for a writer, rich. I would rather have found him poor and obscure; the price he had paid for fame and fortune was too high. He had an iron constitution and phenomenal powers of work. I have known him to write a book in six weeks and doubt if he ever took more than three months over any novel. He worked under great pressure, with a full head of steam on, day in day out. The pace he had set was beginning to tell on him, but it seemed he could not alter it. He had little sense of self-preservation and was full of whimsies about his diet. We owed our first Roman home to him, for he lent us his apartment in the historic Palazzo Santa Croce, where tradition says Beatrice Cenci lived at one time. During the first part of our stay here I was harried by a recurrent nightmare. Night after night I found myself in a room that my waking eye had never seen, a blind room, without windows or doors, in the center of which stood a funeral catafalque draped in black. This vision obsessed me: even by day I could not wholly escape it. After a time it happened that certain repairs were needed on the foundations of the palace. In making them, the workmen came upon a small closed cellar filled with human bones. Further search was made, and over the cellar was found an oubliette whose entrance, walled up for centuries, was directly below my room. Two nights after this, as the bells of the Pietà del Monte rang midnight, a funeral car drew up before the palace, the bones were carried away, and buried with whatever ceremony the church allowed. After that I slept in peace. The tower room where Crawford had worked became J.’s studio. On the walls hung casts from the faces of the great men described in Crawford’s “With the Immortals”, Napoleon, Beethoven, and best of all the famous death mask of Dante. This last so much impressed J. that he made a drawing of it in colored pastels. Dissatisfied with the work, he crumpled up the drawing and threw it in the waste basket. I rescued it, smoothed out the tumbled paper and “unbeknownst” took it to the framer’s. When the drawing came home I hung it up in the salon. “See how nicely your Dante looks now!” I exclaimed. “Not nice at all! Don’t let anybody see it!” was the answer. Crestfallen I took the drawing to my bedroom. One day when I was ill my Uncle Terry came to see me and caught sight of the Dante. “What a good drawing!” he exclaimed.