of the building, and Beauty made it pretty with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face.  A stroke of luck coming one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers.  Then, indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano, with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a glimpse of heaven.

Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and below it.  The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor’s tavern—­and ’The Jolly Shipmates’ was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.  Often have I sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky from which Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou’-westers, who could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.

From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet somehow could not contrive to look busy.  Finally came an airy echoing landing, a region of empty rooms, which the landlords in vain recommended as studios to a city that loved not art.  Here dwelt the keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love and Beauty.  There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere, as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that could find root and breathing.  But once along the bare passage and through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.

Once upon a time, in that enchanted past where dwell all the dreams we love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon, a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades, stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob’s ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.

I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot.  Leonardo, ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of earth with the art of heaven.  But, whoever should paint it, God certainly made it—­must have been the comment of any one who caught a glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like an Assumption of Fra Angelico’s—­that is, any one interested in art and angels.