occasion in a pamphlet, printed and bound in a Florentine floral wall-paper, which today fetches a good sum in old bookshops, when it can be found at all. To those present at this festa, it seemed, doubtless, like the inauguration of the reign of another Lorenzo the Magnificent. There was, indeed, the prospect that Ease and Grace, Beauty, Wit, and Knowledge, would stroll through these stately and ornate chambers for indefinite months, while hungry artists were being fed in the dining-room. But to Edith, this culminating dreary festivity was the end. She had decorated her villa with its last china dog, and the greatest actress in the world was standing on her loggia. Under the circumstances, further progress in this direction seemed impossible. She was even somewhat chagrined to recall that it had taken her three years to accomplish these things and she resolved to move more quickly in the future. So, packing enough of her treasures to furnish an apartment in New York, she shut the villa door without looking behind her, and booked a passage on the next boat sailing from Genoa.
In New York she found the top floor of an old mansion in Washington Square exactly what she wanted and installed green glass, lovely fabrics, and old Italian furniture against the ivory-white of the walls and the hangings. She accomplished the setting in a week; now she required the further decoration which the human element would afford. Art, for the moment, was her preoccupation and, with
