Rowland’s second guest was also an artist, but of a very different type.  His friends called him Sam Singleton; he was an American, and he had been in Rome a couple of years.  He painted small landscapes, chiefly in water-colors:  Rowland had seen one of them in a shop window, had liked it extremely, and, ascertaining his address, had gone to see him and found him established in a very humble studio near the Piazza Barberini, where, apparently, fame and fortune had not yet found him out.  Rowland took a fancy to him and bought several of his pictures; Singleton made few speeches, but was grateful.  Rowland heard afterwards that when he first came to Rome he painted worthless daubs and gave no promise of talent.  Improvement had come, however, hand in hand with patient industry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was now incontestable.  It was as yet but scantily recognized, and he had hard work to live.  Rowland hung his little water-colors on the parlor wall, and found that, as he lived with them, he grew very fond of them.  Singleton was a diminutive, dwarfish personage; he looked like a precocious child.  He had a high, protuberant forehead, a transparent brown eye, a perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and patience.  He listened much more willingly than he talked, with a little fixed, grateful grin; he blushed when he spoke, and always offered his ideas in a sidelong fashion, as if the presumption were against them.  His modesty set them off, and they were eminently to the point.  He was so perfect an example of the little noiseless, laborious artist whom chance, in the person of a moneyed patron, has never taken by the hand, that Rowland would have liked to befriend him by stealth.  Singleton had expressed a fervent admiration for Roderick’s productions, but had not yet met the young master.  Roderick was lounging against the chimney-piece when he came in, and Rowland presently introduced him.  The little water-colorist stood with folded hands, blushing, smiling, and looking up at him as if Roderick were himself a statue on a pedestal.  Singleton began to murmur something about his pleasure, his admiration; the desire to make his compliment smoothly gave him a kind of grotesque formalism.  Roderick looked down at him surprised, and suddenly burst into a laugh.  Singleton paused a moment and then, with an intenser smile, went on:  “Well, sir, your statues are beautiful, all the same!”

Rowland’s two other guests were ladies, and one of them, Miss Blanchard, belonged also to the artistic fraternity.  She was an American, she was young, she was pretty, and she had made her way to Rome alone and unaided.  She lived alone, or with no other duenna than a bushy-browed old serving-woman, though indeed she had a friendly neighbor in the person of a certain Madame Grandoni, who in various social emergencies lent her a protecting wing, and had come with her to Rowland’s dinner.  Miss Blanchard had a little money, but she was not above selling her