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RONALD WALTERS.

In prosperous moments it was my habit on the way back from the Soula to slop at the Café Greco and, without sitting down, eat a cake or a sandwich which took the place of dinner. The Café Greco was, and probably still is, the meeting-place of the intellectual foreigners in Rome. I remember it as being on a side street and very quiet. 

One day I stopped there as usual and was about to eat a cream-cake when I caught the amused glances of a young man seated at a table. I recognized him. Once, passing by, he greeted my English friend who thereupon introduced him to me as Ronald Walters. He now came up to me, shook hands, and began at once in an Oxford accent to declaim against cream-puffs. Never would I eat one again if I knew in what a "beastly awful" way they were made.

I scarcely listened to what he said for my attention was entirely occupied by the personality of the young man standing before me. In reality he was an intellectual Oxford student who had, like many others, passed successfully through the medieval surroundings of an English College to emerge, with the mentality of a Greek pagan.

But what I saw at the time was an attractive combination of sophistication and extreme youth. Even the features followed this double tendency for though the marked eye-brows met low, they failed to throw the slightest shadow on the clear eyes beneath; and the boy's smiling mouth claimed no relationship with the cynical lines that encircled it. 

There is no doubt that we are mutually attracted to each other for when he asked to accompany me to my studio I consented, and on the way there we planned a walk for the following day. That particular walk, who should I find there to my surprise, but my English artist friend who had supposedly left Rome, as I thought, for good.