At the close of the Carnival season, singers who have been abroad for the winter season appear in the Gallery.  They come from London, St. Petersburg, New York, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, looking for new contracts.  They have trotted about the globe as though the whole world were home to them.  They have spent a week in a train or a month on a steamer, to get back to their corner in the Gallery.  Nothing has changed, for all of their distant rambles.  They take their usual table.  They renew their old intrigues, their old gossip, their old jealousies, as if they had been gone a day.  They stand around in front of the show-windows with an air of proud disdain, like princes traveling incognito, but unable quite to conceal their exalted station.  They tell about the ovations accorded them by foreign audiences.  They exhibit the diamonds on their fingers and in their neckties.  They hint at affairs with great ladies who offered to leave home and husband to follow them to Milan.  They exaggerate the salaries they received on their trip, and frown haughtily when some unfortunate “colleague” solicits a drink at the nearby Biffi.  And when the new contracts come in, the mercenary nightingales again take wing, indifferently, they care not whither.  Once more, trains and steamers distribute them, with their conceits and their petulances, all over the globe, to gather them in again some months later and bring them back to the Gallery, their real home—­the spot to which they are really tied, and on which they are fated to drag out their old age.

Meantime, the pariahs, those who never arrive, the “bohemians” of Milan—­when they are left alone console themselves with tales of famous comrades, of contracts they themselves refused to accept, pretending uncompromising hauteur toward impresarios and composers to justify their idleness; and wrapped in fur coats that almost sweep the ground, with their “garibaldis” on the backs of their heads, they hover around Biffi’s, defying the cold draughts that blow at the crossing of the Gallery, talking and talking away to quiet the hunger that is gnawing at their stomachs; despising the humble toil of those who make their living by their hands, continuing undaunted in their poverty, content with their genius as artists, facing misfortune with a candor and an endurance as heroic as it is pathetic, their dark lives illumined by Hope, who keeps them company till she closes their eyes.

Of that strange world, Rafael had caught a glimpse, barely, during the few days he had spent in Milan.  His companion, the canon, had run across a former chorister from the cathedral of Valencia, who could find nothing to do but loiter night and day about the Gallery.  Through him Brull had learned of the life led by these journeymen of art, always on hand in the “marketplace”, waiting for the employer who never comes.

He tried to picture the early days of Leonora in that great city, as one of the girls who trot gracefully over the sidewalks with music sheets under their arms, or enliven the narrow side streets with all those trills and cadences that come streaming out through the windows.