His studio was a huge,
empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an
old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used
to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies
and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same
quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at
home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in
Rowland's more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches
and gardens.
Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace not far
from the Fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and
pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air
of leisurely permanence. He had the tastes of a collector; he spent half
his afternoons ransacking the dusty magazines of the curiosity-mongers,
and often made his way, in quest of a prize, into the heart of
impecunious Roman households, which had been prevailed upon to
listen--with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile--to proposals
for an hereditary "antique.
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