It was this sense for reality that impelled him to settle where the rest of us merely perched.  Fifty contadini tilled his domain and actually began to earn out the costly improvements he had introduced.  His wine and oil were sought by those who knew and were willing to pay.  In the intervals of the major passion Crocker walked up and down the grassy roads superintending the larger operations.  His muscular and hulking blondness—­he had rowed four years—­towered above the dark little men who served, feared, and worshipped him.  Unlike the rest of us who preferred to live in a delightful Cloud Cuckoo Town, which happened to be Florence also, he had chosen to take root in Tuscany.

First he purged his castellated villa of the international abuses it had undergone for a century.  It had hardly regained its fifteenth century spaciousness and simplicity before it began to fill up again, but this time with pictures and fittings of the time.  In all directions he bought with enthusiasm, but his real vocation, after the cultivation of Emma’s society, soon came to be the completion of his great and growing altar-piece by Carlo Crivelli.  What is usually a frigid exercise, a mere ascertainment that the parts of a scattered ancona are at London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Boston, etc.—­a patient compilation of measurements, documents and probabilities; what is generally a mere pretext for a solid article in a heavy journal—­or at best a question of pasting photographs together in the order the artist intended—­Crocker converted into an eager and most practical pursuit.  Bit by bit he gradually reconstituted his Crivelli in its ancient glory of enamel on gold within its ornate mouldings.  The quest prospered capitally until he stuck hopelessly at the missing St. Michael.  As it stood for a couple of years complete except for the void where the St. Michael should be, the altar-piece represented less Crocker’s abundant resources than his tireless patience and energy.  He had picked up the first fragment, a slender St. Catherine of Alexandria demurely leaning upon her spiked wheel, at a provincial antiquary’s in Romagna, not far from where the ancona had been impiously dismembered.  Fortunately the original Gothic frame remained to give a clue to other panels.  Next, word of a Crivelli Madonna with Donors at Christie’s took him posthaste to London.  Frame, period and measurements proved that it was the central panel, and the tiny donors, a husband and wife with a boy and girl, indicated that the wings had contained two female and two male saints.  Between the St. Lucy (which turned up more than a year later in an un-heard-of Swedish collection, and was had only by a hard exchange for a rare Lorenzo Monaco and a plausible Fra Angelico) and the sumptuous St. Augustine, which was brought to the villa in a barrow by a little dealer, there was a longer interval.  Meanwhile the frame had been reconstructed, and a niche for the missing saint rose in melancholy emptiness.