I hope to go down to Sorrento on Thursday for Eleanor Crawford’s wedding. I shall be better perhaps for a little sea air and change, as I have been pretty steadily at it since I returned to Rome nearly a year ago. I am by nature what the Arabs call “a son of the way”! If there are female tramps among them, I suppose it would be called a daughter of the way. The first great Woman’s Congress will be held here soon at the new Palace of Justice. Etta de Viti and Cora Brazza (two American girls married to Italian noblemen) have worked so hard for it they are on the verge of breaking down. Last night we had an interesting man for dinner, Wilfranc Hubbard, the new correspondent of the _London Times_, who takes the place of Wickham Steed, who has been sent to Berlin. The position of the _Times_ correspondent here is almost an official one, and ten times as important as most official appointments. Carl Federn came too, the man who, I am told, first gave Emerson to Germany through his translation. He is a little flame of a creature like zigzag lightning; he is a friend of Elizabeth Fairchild and the defender of Linda Murri, whom he believes was falsely accused of murdering her husband. Most interesting of all our guests was Cunninghame Graham. He is a writer and a lovely person of exquisite charm. Of an old Scotch family, he has inherited much from a Spanish grandfather. He is a liberal if not a socialist. He has comforted much, for I get so confused with the pressure on my mind of Rome’s conservatism. You see almost all artists are naturally conservatives. They say there has never been a great art without great art patrons. The argument that neither republicanism or socialism makes for art is hard to refute. “The greatest good of the greatest number may be a high ideal, for a state to strive for,” they say, “but it is leveling! Every man will be his own poet and painter.” * * * * * Rome, December 28, 1908. I reached home safely at six o’clock in the evening of Christmas Day. The great Christmas present was the fact that the picture (Diana of the Tides) was finished. Just as J. was signing his name to the big canvas the telegram announcing my arrival was slipped under his door. Rather a neat coincidence!