won't do, because, though he 's rich, he 's not rich enough. Mamma made
that discovery the day after we went to see you, moved to it by the
promising look of your furniture. I hope she was right, eh? Unless you
have millions, you know, you have no chance."

"I feel like a beggar," said Rowland.

"Oh, some better girl than I will decide some day, after mature
reflection, that on the whole you have enough. Mr. Hudson, of course, is
nowhere; he has nothing but his genius and his beaux yeux."

Roderick had stood looking at Christina intently while she delivered
herself, softly and slowly, of this surprising nonsense. When she had
finished, she turned and looked at him; their eyes met, and he blushed
a little. "Let me model you, and he who can may marry you!" he said,
abruptly.

Mrs. Light, while her daughter talked, had been adding a few touches to
her coiffure. "She is not so silly as you might suppose," she said to
Rowland, with dignity. "If you will give me your arm, we will go and
look at the bust."

"Does that represent a silly girl?" Christina demanded, when they stood
before it.

Rowland transferred his glance several times from the portrait to the
original. "It represents a young lady," he said, "whom I should not
pretend to judge off-hand."

"She may be a fool, but you are not sure. Many thanks! You have seen me
half a dozen times. You are either very slow or I am very deep."

"I am certainly slow," said Rowland. "I don't expect to make up my mind
about you within six months."

"I give you six months if you will promise then a perfectly frank
opinion. Mind, I shall not forget; I shall insist upon it."

"Well, though I am slow, I am tolerably brave," said Rowland. "We shall
see."

Christina looked at the bust with a sigh. "I am afraid, after all," she
said, "that there 's very little wisdom in it save what the artist has
put there. Mr. Hudson looked particularly wise while he was working; he
scowled and growled, but he never opened his mouth. It is very kind of
him not to have represented me gaping."

"If I had talked a lot of stuff to you," said Roderick, roundly, "the
thing would not have been a tenth so good."

"Is it good, after all? Mr. Mallet is a famous connoisseur; has he not
come here to pronounce?"

The bust was in fact a very happy performance, and Roderick had risen to
the level of his subject. It was thoroughly a portrait, and not a vague
fantasy executed on a graceful theme, as the busts of pretty women, in
modern sculpture, are apt to be. The resemblance was deep and vivid;
there was extreme fidelity of detail and yet a noble simplicity.
One could say of the head that, without idealization, it was a
representation of ideal beauty. Rowland, however, as we know, was not
fond of exploding into superlatives, and, after examining the piece,
contented himself with suggesting two or three alterations of detail.

"Nay, how can you be so cruel?" demanded Mrs. Light, with soft
reproachfulness. "It is surely a wonderful thing!"

"Rowland knows it 's a wonderful thing," said Roderick, smiling. "I can
tell that by his face. The other day I finished something he thought
bad, and he looked very differently from this."

"How did Mr. Mallet look?" asked Christina.

"My dear Rowland," said Roderick, "I am speaking of my seated woman. You
looked as if you had on a pair of tight boots."

"Ah, my child, you 'll not understand that!" cried Mrs. Light. "You
never yet had a pair that were small enough."

"It 's a pity, Mr. Hudson," said Christina, gravely, "that you could
not have introduced my feet into the bust. But we can hang a pair of
slippers round the neck!"

"I nevertheless like your statues, Roderick," Rowland rejoined, "better
than your jokes. This is admirable. Miss Light, you may be proud!"

"Thank you, Mr. Mallet, for the permission," rejoined the young girl.

"I am dying to see it in the marble, with a red velvet screen behind
it," said Mrs. Light.

"Placed there under the Sassoferrato!" Christina went on. "I hope you
keep well in mind, Mr. Hudson, that you have not a grain of property in
your work, and that if mamma chooses, she may have it photographed and
the copies sold in the Piazza di Spagna, at five francs apiece, without
your having a sou of the profits."

"Amen!" said Roderick. "It was so nominated in the bond. My profits are
here!" and he tapped his forehead.

"It would be prettier if you said here!" And Christina touched her
heart.

"My precious child, how you do run on!" murmured Mrs. Light.

"It is Mr. Mallet," the young girl answered. "I can't talk a word of
sense so long as he is in the room. I don't say that to make you go,"
she added, "I say it simply to justify myself."

Rowland bowed in silence. Roderick declared that he must get at work and
requested Christina to take her usual position, and Mrs. Light proposed
to her visitor that they should adjourn to her boudoir. This was a
small room, hardly more spacious than an alcove, opening out of the
drawing-room and having no other issue. Here, as they entered, on a
divan near the door, Rowland perceived the Cavaliere Giacosa, with his
arms folded, his head dropped upon his breast, and his eyes closed.

"Sleeping at his post!" said Rowland with a kindly laugh.

"That 's a punishable offense," rejoined Mrs. Light, sharply. She was on
the point of calling him, in the same tone, when he suddenly opened his
eyes, stared a moment, and then rose with a smile and a bow.

"Excuse me, dear lady," he said, "I was overcome by the--the great
heat."

"Nonsense, Cavaliere!" cried the lady, "you know we are perishing here
with the cold! You had better go and cool yourself in one of the other
rooms."

"I obey, dear lady," said the Cavaliere; and with another smile and bow
to Rowland he departed, walking very discreetly on his toes. Rowland
out-stayed him but a short time, for he was not fond of Mrs. Light,
and he found nothing very inspiring in her frank intimation that if he
chose, he might become a favorite. He was disgusted with himself for
pleasing her; he confounded his fatal urbanity. In the court-yard of the
palace he overtook the Cavaliere, who had stopped at the porter's lodge
to say a word to his little girl. She was a young lady of very tender
years and she wore a very dirty pinafore. He had taken her up in his
arms and was singing an infantine rhyme to her, and she was staring at
him with big, soft Roman eyes. On seeing Rowland he put her down with
a kiss, and stepped forward with a conscious grin, an unresentful
admission that he was sensitive both to chubbiness and ridicule.
Rowland began to pity him again; he had taken his dismissal from the
drawing-room so meekly.

"You don't keep your promise," said Rowland, "to come and see me. Don't
forget it. I want you to tell me about Rome thirty years ago."

"Thirty years ago? Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where
strange things happen! But happy things too, since I have your renewed
permission to call. You do me too much honor. Is it in the morning or in
the evening that I should least intrude?"

"Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come, sometime. I depend upon you,"
said Rowland.

The Cavaliere thanked him with an humble obeisance. To the Cavaliere,
too, he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic, but the idea of
pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.

Miss Light's bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick's studio,
and half the foreign colony came to see it. With the completion of his
work, however, Roderick's visits at the Palazzo F---- by no means came
to an end. He spent half his time in Mrs. Light's drawing-room, and
began to be talked about as "attentive" to Christina. The success of the
bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humor he
suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in
his thoughts. Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener
than speaker; partly because Roderick's own tone was so resonant and
exultant, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for
having called her unsafe, he was too perplexed to defend himself.
The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex,
willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding
spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper. And yet he strongly felt
her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow
of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal,
was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her
beauty.

"I had no idea of it," he said, "till I began to look at her with an eye
to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most
exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not
a line without meaning, not a hair's breadth that is not admirably
finished. And then her mouth! It 's as if a pair of lips had been shaped
to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!" Later, after he had been
working for a week, he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain,
she would still be the most fascinating of women. "I 've quite forgotten
her beauty," he said, "or rather I have ceased to perceive it as
something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of
her. She is all one, and all consummately interesting!"

"What does she do--what does she say, that is so remarkable?" Rowland
had asked.

"Say? Sometimes nothing--sometimes everything. She is never the same.
Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a
smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore. She hardly looks
at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work. On other
days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions, and pours out
the most irresistible nonsense. She is a creature of moods; you can't
count upon her; she keeps observation on the stretch. And then, bless
you, she has seen such a lot! Her talk is full of the oddest allusions!"

"It is altogether a very singular type of young lady," said Rowland,
after the visit which I have related at length. "It may be a charm, but
it is certainly not the orthodox charm of marriageable maidenhood, the
charm of shrinking innocence and soft docility. Our American girls
are accused of being more knowing than any others, and Miss Light is
nominally an American. But it has taken twenty years of Europe to make
her what she is. The first time we saw her, I remember you called her a
product of the old world, and certainly you were not far wrong."

"Ah, she has an atmosphere," said Roderick, in the tone of high
appreciation.

"Young unmarried women," Rowland answered, "should be careful not to
have too much!"

"Ah, you don't forgive her," cried his companion, "for hitting you so
hard! A man ought to be flattered at such a girl as that taking so much
notice of him."

"A man is never flattered at a woman's not liking him."

"Are you sure she does n't like you? That 's to the credit of your
humility. A fellow of more vanity might, on the evidence, persuade
himself that he was in favor."

"He would have also," said Rowland, laughing, "to be a fellow of
remarkable ingenuity!" He asked himself privately how the deuce Roderick
reconciled it to his conscience to think so much more of the girl he
was not engaged to than of the girl he was. But it amounted almost to
arrogance, you may say, in poor Rowland to pretend to know how often
Roderick thought of Miss Garland. He wondered gloomily, at any rate,
whether for men of his companion's large, easy power, there was not
a larger moral law than for narrow mediocrities like himself, who,
yielding Nature a meagre interest on her investment (such as it was),
had no reason to expect from her this affectionate laxity as to their
accounts. Was it not a part of the eternal fitness of things that
Roderick, while rhapsodizing about Miss Light, should have it at his
command to look at you with eyes of the most guileless and unclouded
blue, and to shake off your musty imputations by a toss of his
picturesque brown locks? Or had he, in fact, no conscience to speak of?
Happy fellow, either way!

Our friend Gloriani came, among others, to congratulate Roderick on
his model and what he had made of her. "Devilish pretty, through and
through!" he said as he looked at the bust. "Capital handling of the
neck and throat; lovely work on the nose. You 're a detestably lucky
fellow, my boy! But you ought not to have squandered such material on a
simple bust; you should have made a great imaginative figure. If I could
only have got hold of her, I would have put her into a statue in spite
of herself. What a pity she is not a ragged Trasteverine, whom we might
have for a franc an hour! I have been carrying about in my head for
years a delicious design for a fantastic figure, but it has always
stayed there for want of a tolerable model. I have seen intimations of
the type, but Miss Light is the perfection of it. As soon as I saw her I
said to myself, 'By Jove, there 's my statue in the flesh!'"

"What is your subject?" asked Roderick.

"Don't take it ill," said Gloriani. "You know I 'm the very deuce for
observation. She would make a magnificent Herodias!"

If Roderick had taken it ill (which was unlikely, for we know he thought
Gloriani an ass, and expected little of his wisdom), he might have been
soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an
hour in a sort of mental prostration before both bust and artist.
But Roderick's attitude before his patient little devotee was one
of undisguised though friendly amusement; and, indeed, judged from a
strictly plastic point of view, the poor fellow's diminutive stature,
his enormous mouth, his pimples and his yellow hair were sufficiently
ridiculous. "Nay, don't envy our friend," Rowland said to Singleton
afterwards, on his expressing, with a little groan of depreciation of
his own paltry performances, his sense of the brilliancy of Roderick's
talent. "You sail nearer the shore, but you sail in smoother waters. Be
contented with what you are and paint me another picture."

"Oh, I don't envy Hudson anything he possesses," Singleton said,
"because to take anything away would spoil his beautiful completeness.
'Complete,' that 's what he is; while we little clevernesses are like
half-ripened plums, only good eating on the side that has had a glimpse
of the sun. Nature has made him so, and fortune confesses to it! He is
the handsomest fellow in Rome, he has the most genius, and, as a matter
of course, the most beautiful girl in the world comes and offers to be
his model. If that is not completeness, where shall we find it?"

One morning, going into Roderick's studio, Rowland found the young
sculptor entertaining Miss Blanchard--if this is not too flattering a
description of his gracefully passive tolerance of her presence. He had
never liked her and never climbed into her sky-studio to observe her
wonderful manipulation of petals. He had once quoted Tennyson against
her:--

"And is there any moral shut
Within the bosom of the rose?"

"In all Miss Blanchard's roses you may be sure there is a moral," he had
said. "You can see it sticking out its head, and, if you go to smell the
flower, it scratches your nose." But on this occasion she had come
with a propitiatory gift--introducing her friend Mr. Leavenworth. Mr.
Leavenworth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully
brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-favored face, which seemed,
somehow, to have more room in it than was occupied by a smile of
superior benevolence, so that (with his smooth, white forehead) it bore
a certain resemblance to a large parlor with a very florid carpet, but
no pictures on the walls. He held his head high, talked sonorously, and
told Roderick, within five minutes, that he was a widower, traveling
to distract his mind, and that he had lately retired from the
proprietorship of large mines of borax in Pennsylvania. Roderick
supposed at first that, in his character of depressed widower, he had
come to order a tombstone; but observing then the extreme blandness
of his address to Miss Blanchard, he credited him with a judicious
prevision that by the time the tombstone was completed, a monument
of his inconsolability might have become an anachronism. But Mr.
Leavenworth was disposed to order something.

"You will find me eager to patronize our indigenous talent," he said. "I
am putting up a little shanty in my native town, and I propose to make
a rather nice thing of it. It has been the will of Heaven to plunge me
into mourning; but art has consolations! In a tasteful home, surrounded
by the memorials of my wanderings, I hope to take more cheerful views.
I ordered in Paris the complete appurtenances of a dining-room. Do you
think you could do something for my library? It is to be filled
with well-selected authors, and I think a pure white image in this
style,"--pointing to one of Roderick's statues,--"standing out against
the morocco and gilt, would have a noble effect. The subject I have
already fixed upon. I desire an allegorical representation of Culture.
Do you think, now," asked Mr. Leavenworth, encouragingly, "you could
rise to the conception?"

"A most interesting subject for a truly serious mind," remarked Miss
Blanchard.

Roderick looked at her a moment, and then--"The simplest thing I
could do," he said, "would be to make a full-length portrait of Miss
Blanchard. I could give her a scroll in her hand, and that would do for
the allegory."

Miss Blanchard colored; the compliment might be ironical; and there
was ever afterwards a reflection of her uncertainty in her opinion of
Roderick's genius. Mr. Leavenworth responded that with all deference to
Miss Blanchard's beauty, he desired something colder, more monumental,
more impersonal. "If I were to be the happy possessor of a likeness of
Miss Blanchard," he added, "I should prefer to have it in no factitious
disguise!"

Roderick consented to entertain the proposal, and while they were
discussing it, Rowland had a little talk with the fair artist. "Who is
your friend?" he asked.

"A very worthy man. The architect of his own fortune--which is
magnificent. One of nature's gentlemen!"

This was a trifle sententious, and Rowland turned to the bust of Miss
Light. Like every one else in Rome, by this time, Miss Blanchard had
an opinion on the young girl's beauty, and, in her own fashion, she
expressed it epigrammatically. "She looks half like a Madonna and half
like a ballerina," she said.

Mr. Leavenworth and Roderick came to an understanding, and the young
sculptor good-naturedly promised to do his best to rise to his patron's
conception. "His conception be hanged!" Roderick exclaimed, after he had
departed. "His conception is sitting on a globe with a pen in her ear
and a photographic album in her hand. I shall have to conceive, myself.
For the money, I ought to be able to!"

Mrs. Light, meanwhile, had fairly established herself in Roman society.
"Heaven knows how!" Madame Grandoni said to Rowland, who had mentioned
to her several evidences of the lady's prosperity. "In such a case
there is nothing like audacity. A month ago she knew no one but her
washerwoman, and now I am told that the cards of Roman princesses are to
be seen on her table. She is evidently determined to play a great
part, and she has the wit to perceive that, to make remunerative
acquaintances, you must seem yourself to be worth knowing. You must
have striking rooms and a confusing variety of dresses, and give good
dinners, and so forth. She is spending a lot of money, and you 'll see
that in two or three weeks she will take upon herself to open the season
by giving a magnificent ball. Of course it is Christina's beauty that
floats her. People go to see her because they are curious."

"And they go again because they are charmed," said Rowland. "Miss
Christina is a very remarkable young lady."

"Oh, I know it well; I had occasion to say so to myself the other day.
She came to see me, of her own free will, and for an hour she was deeply
interesting. I think she 's an actress, but she believes in her part
while she is playing it. She took it into her head the other day to
believe that she was very unhappy, and she sat there, where you are
sitting, and told me a tale of her miseries which brought tears into my
eyes. She cried, herself, profusely, and as naturally as possible. She
said she was weary of life and that she knew no one but me she could
speak frankly to. She must speak, or she would go mad. She sobbed as if
her heart would break. I assure you it 's well for you susceptible young
men that you don't see her when she sobs. She said, in so many words,
that her mother was an immoral woman. Heaven knows what she meant. She
meant, I suppose, that she makes debts that she knows she can't pay. She
said the life they led was horrible; that it was monstrous a poor girl
should be dragged about the world to be sold to the highest bidder. She
was meant for better things; she could be perfectly happy in poverty. It
was not money she wanted. I might not believe her, but she really cared
for serious things. Sometimes she thought of taking poison!"

"What did you say to that?"

"I recommended her," said Madame Grandoni, "to come and see me
instead. I would help her about as much, and I was, on the whole, less
unpleasant. Of course I could help her only by letting her talk herself
out and kissing her and patting her beautiful hands and telling her to
be patient and she would be happy yet. About once in two months I expect
her to reappear, on the same errand, and meanwhile to quite forget my
existence. I believe I melted down to the point of telling her that
I would find some good, quiet, affectionate husband for her; but she
declared, almost with fury, that she was sick unto death of husbands,
and begged I would never again mention the word. And, in fact, it was a
rash offer; for I am sure that there is not a man of the kind that might
really make a woman happy but would be afraid to marry mademoiselle.
Looked at in that way she is certainly very much to be pitied, and
indeed, altogether, though I don't think she either means all she says
or, by a great deal, says all that she means. I feel very sorry for
her."

Rowland met the two ladies, about this time, at several entertainments,
and looked at Christina with a kind of distant attendrissement. He
imagined more than once that there had been a passionate scene between
them about coming out, and wondered what arguments Mrs. Light had found
effective. But Christina's face told no tales, and she moved about,
beautiful and silent, looking absently over people's heads, barely
heeding the men who pressed about her, and suggesting somehow that the
soul of a world-wearied mortal had found its way into the blooming body
of a goddess. "Where in the world has Miss Light been before she is
twenty," observers asked, "to have left all her illusions behind?" And
the general verdict was, that though she was incomparably beautiful, she
was intolerably proud. Young ladies to whom the former distinction was
not conceded were free to reflect that she was "not at all liked."

It would have been difficult to guess, however, how they reconciled this
conviction with a variety of conflicting evidence, and, in especial,
with the spectacle of Roderick's inveterate devotion. All Rome might
behold that he, at least, "liked" Christina Light. Wherever she
appeared he was either awaiting her or immediately followed her. He was
perpetually at her side, trying, apparently, to preserve the thread of
a disconnected talk, the fate of which was, to judge by her face,
profoundly immaterial to the young lady. People in general smiled at the
radiant good faith of the handsome young sculptor, and asked each other
whether he really supposed that beauties of that quality were meant to
wed with poor artists. But although Christina's deportment, as I have
said, was one of superb inexpressiveness, Rowland had derived from
Roderick no suspicion that he suffered from snubbing, and he was
therefore surprised at an incident which befell one evening at a large
musical party. Roderick, as usual, was in the field, and, on the ladies
taking the chairs which had been arranged for them, he immediately
placed himself beside Christina. As most of the gentlemen were standing,
his position made him as conspicuous as Hamlet at Ophelia's feet, at the
play. Rowland was leaning, somewhat apart, against the chimney-piece.
There was a long, solemn pause before the music began, and in the midst
of it Christina rose, left her place, came the whole length of the
immense room, with every one looking at her, and stopped before him. She
was neither pale nor flushed; she had a soft smile.

"Will you do me a favor?" she asked.

"A thousand!"

"Not now, but at your earliest convenience. Please remind Mr. Hudson
that he is not in a New England village--that it is not the custom in
Rome to address one's conversation exclusively, night after night, to
the same poor girl, and that"....

The music broke out with a great blare and covered her voice. She made a
gesture of impatience, and Rowland offered her his arm and led her back
to her seat.

The next day he repeated her words to Roderick, who burst into joyous
laughter. "She 's a delightfully strange girl!" he cried. "She must do
everything that comes into her head!"

"Had she never asked you before not to talk to her so much?"

"On the contrary, she has often said to me, 'Mind you now, I forbid you
to leave me. Here comes that tiresome So-and-so.' She cares as little
about the custom as I do. What could be a better proof than her walking
up to you, with five hundred people looking at her? Is that the custom
for young girls in Rome?"

"Why, then, should she take such a step?"

"Because, as she sat there, it came into her head. That 's reason enough
for her. I have imagined she wishes me well, as they say here--though
she has never distinguished me in such a way as that!"

Madame Grandoni had foretold the truth; Mrs. Light, a couple of weeks
later, convoked all Roman society to a brilliant ball. Rowland went
late, and found the staircase so encumbered with flower-pots and
servants that he was a long time making his way into the presence of the
hostess. At last he approached her, as she stood making courtesies at
the door, with her daughter by her side. Some of Mrs. Light's courtesies
were very low, for she had the happiness of receiving a number of the
social potentates of the Roman world. She was rosy with triumph, to say
nothing of a less metaphysical cause, and was evidently vastly contented
with herself, with her company, and with the general promise of destiny.
Her daughter was less overtly jubilant, and distributed her greetings
with impartial frigidity. She had never been so beautiful. Dressed
simply in vaporous white, relieved with half a dozen white roses, the
perfection of her features and of her person and the mysterious depth of
her expression seemed to glow with the white light of a splendid pearl.
She recognized no one individually, and made her courtesy slowly,
gravely, with her eyes on the ground. Rowland fancied that, as he stood
before her, her obeisance was slightly exaggerated, as with an intention
of irony; but he smiled philosophically to himself, and reflected, as
he passed into the room, that, if she disliked him, he had nothing
to reproach himself with. He walked about, had a few words with Miss
Blanchard, who, with a fillet of cameos in her hair, was leaning on the
arm of Mr. Leavenworth, and at last came upon the Cavaliere Giacosa,
modestly stationed in a corner. The little gentleman's coat-lappet was
decorated with an enormous bouquet and his neck encased in a voluminous
white handkerchief of the fashion of thirty years ago. His arms were
folded, and he was surveying the scene with contracted eyelids, through
which you saw the glitter of his intensely dark, vivacious pupil.
He immediately embarked on an elaborate apology for not having yet
manifested, as he felt it, his sense of the honor Rowland had done him.

"I am always on service with these ladies, you see," he explained, "and
that is a duty to which one would not willingly be faithless for an
instant."

"Evidently," said Rowland, "you are a very devoted friend. Mrs. Light,
in her situation, is very happy in having you."

"We are old friends," said the Cavaliere, gravely. "Old friends. I knew
the signora many years ago, when she was the prettiest woman in Rome--or
rather in Ancona, which is even better. The beautiful Christina, now, is
perhaps the most beautiful young girl in Europe!"

"Very likely," said Rowland.

"Very well, sir, I taught her to read; I guided her little hands to
touch the piano keys." And at these faded memories, the Cavaliere's eyes
glittered more brightly. Rowland half expected him to proceed, with a
little flash of long-repressed passion, "And now--and now, sir, they
treat me as you observed the other day!" But the Cavaliere only looked
out at him keenly from among his wrinkles, and seemed to say, with all
the vividness of the Italian glance, "Oh, I say nothing more. I am not
so shallow as to complain!"

Evidently the Cavaliere was not shallow, and Rowland repeated
respectfully, "You are a devoted friend."

"That 's very true. I am a devoted friend. A man may do himself justice,
after twenty years!"

Rowland, after a pause, made some remark about the beauty of the ball.
It was very brilliant.

"Stupendous!" said the Cavaliere, solemnly. "It is a great day. We have
four Roman princes, to say nothing of others." And he counted them over
on his fingers and held up his hand triumphantly. "And there she stands,
the girl to whom I--I, Giuseppe Giacosa--taught her alphabet and her
piano-scales; there she stands in her incomparable beauty, and Roman
princes come and bow to her. Here, in his corner, her old master permits
himself to be proud."

"It is very friendly of him," said Rowland, smiling.

The Cavaliere contracted his lids a little more and gave another keen
glance. "It is very natural, signore. The Christina is a good girl; she
remembers my little services. But here comes," he added in a moment,
"the young Prince of the Fine Arts. I am sure he has bowed lowest of
all."

Rowland looked round and saw Roderick moving slowly across the room and
casting about him his usual luminous, unshrinking looks. He presently
joined them, nodded familiarly to the Cavaliere, and immediately
demanded of Rowland, "Have you seen her?"

"I have seen Miss Light," said Rowland. "She 's magnificent."

"I 'm half crazy!" cried Roderick; so loud that several persons turned
round.

Rowland saw that he was flushed, and laid his hand on his arm. Roderick
was trembling. "If you will go away," Rowland said instantly, "I will go
with you."

"Go away?" cried Roderick, almost angrily. "I intend to dance with her!"

The Cavaliere had been watching him attentively; he gently laid his hand
on his other arm. "Softly, softly, dear young man," he said. "Let me
speak to you as a friend."

"Oh, speak even as an enemy and I shall not mind it," Roderick answered,
frowning.

"Be very reasonable, then, and go away."

"Why the deuce should I go away?"

"Because you are in love," said the Cavaliere.

"I might as well be in love here as in the streets."

"Carry your love as far as possible from Christina. She will not listen
to you--she can't."

"She 'can't'?" demanded Roderick. "She is not a person of whom you may
say that. She can if she will; she does as she chooses."

"Up to a certain point. It would take too long to explain; I only beg
you to believe that if you continue to love Miss Light you will be
very unhappy. Have you a princely title? have you a princely fortune?
Otherwise you can never have her."

And the Cavaliere folded his arms again, like a man who has done his
duty. Roderick wiped his forehead and looked askance at Rowland; he
seemed to be guessing his thoughts and they made him blush a little. But
he smiled blandly, and addressing the Cavaliere, "I 'm much obliged to
you for the information," he said. "Now that I have obtained it, let
me tell you that I am no more in love with Miss Light than you are. Mr.
Mallet knows that. I admire her--yes, profoundly. But that 's no one's
business but my own, and though I have, as you say, neither a princely
title nor a princely fortune, I mean to suffer neither those advantages
nor those who possess them to diminish my right."

"If you are not in love, my dear young man," said the Cavaliere, with
his hand on his heart and an apologetic smile, "so much the better. But
let me entreat you, as an affectionate friend, to keep a watch on your
emotions. You are young, you are handsome, you have a brilliant genius
and a generous heart, but--I may say it almost with authority--Christina
is not for you!"

Whether Roderick was in love or not, he was nettled by what apparently
seemed to him an obtrusive negation of an inspiring possibility. "You
speak as if she had made her choice!" he cried. "Without pretending to
confidential information on the subject, I am sure she has not."

"No, but she must make it soon," said the Cavaliere. And raising his
forefinger, he laid it against his under lip. "She must choose a name
and a fortune--and she will!"

"She will do exactly as her inclination prompts! She will marry the man
who pleases her, if he has n't a dollar! I know her better than you."

The Cavaliere turned a little paler than usual, and smiled more
urbanely. "No, no, my dear young man, you do not know her better than
I. You have not watched her, day by day, for twenty years. I too have
admired her. She is a good girl; she has never said an unkind word
to me; the blessed Virgin be thanked! But she must have a brilliant
destiny; it has been marked out for her, and she will submit. You had
better believe me; it may save you much suffering."

"We shall see!" said Roderick, with an excited laugh.

"Certainly we shall see. But I retire from the discussion," the
Cavaliere added. "I have no wish to provoke you to attempt to prove to
me that I am wrong. You are already excited."

"No more than is natural to a man who in an hour or so is to dance the
cotillon with Miss Light."

"The cotillon? has she promised?"

Roderick patted the air with a grand confidence. "You 'll see!" His
gesture might almost have been taken to mean that the state of his
relations with Miss Light was such that they quite dispensed with vain
formalities.

The Cavaliere gave an exaggerated shrug. "You make a great many
mourners!"

"He has made one already!" Rowland murmured to himself. This was
evidently not the first time that reference had been made between
Roderick and the Cavaliere to the young man's possible passion, and
Roderick had failed to consider it the simplest and most natural course
to say in three words to the vigilant little gentleman that there was
no cause for alarm--his affections were preoccupied. Rowland hoped,
silently, with some dryness, that his motives were of a finer kind
than they seemed to be. He turned away; it was irritating to look at
Roderick's radiant, unscrupulous eagerness. The tide was setting toward
the supper-room and he drifted with it to the door. The crowd at this
point was dense, and he was obliged to wait for some minutes before he
could advance. At last he felt his neighbors dividing behind him, and
turning he saw Christina pressing her way forward alone. She was looking
at no one, and, save for the fact of her being alone, you would not have
supposed she was in her mother's house. As she recognized Rowland she
beckoned to him, took his arm, and motioned him to lead her into the
supper-room. She said nothing until he had forced a passage and they
stood somewhat isolated.

"Take me into the most out-of-the-way corner you can find," she then
said, "and then go and get me a piece of bread."

"Nothing more? There seems to be everything conceivable."

"A simple roll. Nothing more, on your peril. Only bring something for
yourself."

It seemed to Rowland that the embrasure of a window (embrasures in Roman
palaces are deep) was a retreat sufficiently obscure for Miss Light to
execute whatever design she might have contrived against his equanimity.
A roll, after he had found her a seat, was easily procured. As he
presented it, he remarked that, frankly speaking, he was at loss to
understand why she should have selected for the honor of a tete-a-tete
an individual for whom she had so little taste.

"Ah yes, I dislike you," said Christina. "To tell the truth, I had
forgotten it. There are so many people here whom I dislike more, that
when I espied you just now, you seemed like an intimate friend. But I
have not come into this corner to talk nonsense," she went on. "You must
not think I always do, eh?"

"I have never heard you do anything else," said Rowland, deliberately,
having decided that he owed her no compliments.

"Very good. I like your frankness. It 's quite true. You see, I am a
strange girl. To begin with, I am frightfully egotistical. Don't flatter
yourself you have said anything very clever if you ever take it into
your head to tell me so. I know it much better than you. So it is, I
can't help it. I am tired to death of myself; I would give all I possess
to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly
more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet. If a person
wished to do me a favor I would say to him, 'I beg you, with tears in my
eyes, to interest me. Be strong, be positive, be imperious, if you
will; only be something,--something that, in looking at, I can forget my
detestable self!' Perhaps that is nonsense too. If it is, I can't help
it. I can only apologize for the nonsense I know to be such and that I
talk--oh, for more reasons than I can tell you! I wonder whether, if I
were to try, you would understand me."

"I am afraid I should never understand," said Rowland, "why a person
should willingly talk nonsense."

"That proves how little you know about women. But I like your frankness.
When I told you the other day that you displeased me, I had an idea
you were more formal,--how do you say it?--more guinde. I am very
capricious. To-night I like you better."

"Oh, I am not guinde," said Rowland, gravely.

"I beg your pardon, then, for thinking so. Now I have an idea that you
would make a useful friend--an intimate friend--a friend to whom one
could tell everything. For such a friend, what would n't I give!"

Rowland looked at her in some perplexity. Was this touching sincerity,
or unfathomable coquetry? Her beautiful eyes looked divinely candid; but
then, if candor was beautiful, beauty was apt to be subtle. "I hesitate
to recommend myself out and out for the office," he said, "but I believe
that if you were to depend upon me for anything that a friend may do, I
should not be found wanting."

"Very good. One of the first things one asks of a friend is to judge
one not by isolated acts, but by one's whole conduct. I care for your
opinion--I don't know why."

"Nor do I, I confess," said Rowland with a laugh.

"What do you think of this affair?" she continued, without heeding his
laugh.

"Of your ball? Why, it 's a very grand affair."

"It 's horrible--that 's what it is! It 's a mere rabble! There are
people here whom I never saw before, people who were never asked. Mamma
went about inviting every one, asking other people to invite any one
they knew, doing anything to have a crowd. I hope she is satisfied! It
is not my doing. I feel weary, I feel angry, I feel like crying. I have
twenty minds to escape into my room and lock the door and let mamma go
through with it as she can. By the way," she added in a moment, without
a visible reason for the transition, "can you tell me something to
read?"

Rowland stared, at the disconnectedness of the question.

"Can you recommend me some books?" she repeated. "I know you are a great
reader. I have no one else to ask. We can buy no books. We can make
debts for jewelry and bonnets and five-button gloves, but we can't spend
a sou for ideas. And yet, though you may not believe it, I like ideas
quite as well."

"I shall be most happy to lend you some books," Rowland said. "I will
pick some out to-morrow and send them to you."

"No novels, please! I am tired of novels. I can imagine better stories
for myself than any I read. Some good poetry, if there is such a thing
nowadays, and some memoirs and histories and books of facts."

"You shall be served. Your taste agrees with my own."

She was silent a moment, looking at him. Then suddenly--"Tell me
something about Mr. Hudson," she demanded. "You are great friends!"

"Oh yes," said Rowland; "we are great friends."

"Tell me about him. Come, begin!"

"Where shall I begin? You know him for yourself."

"No, I don't know him; I don't find him so easy to know. Since he has
finished my bust and begun to come here disinterestedly, he has become a
great talker. He says very fine things; but does he mean all he says?"

"Few of us do that."

"You do, I imagine. You ought to know, for he tells me you discovered
him." Rowland was silent, and Christina continued, "Do you consider him
very clever?"

"Unquestionably."

"His talent is really something out of the common way?"

"So it seems to me."

"In short, he 's a man of genius?"

"Yes, call it genius."

"And you found him vegetating in a little village and took him by the
hand and set him on his feet in Rome?"

"Is that the popular legend?" asked Rowland.

"Oh, you need n't be modest. There was no great merit in it; there
would have been none at least on my part in the same circumstances.
Real geniuses are not so common, and if I had discovered one in the
wilderness, I would have brought him out into the market-place to see
how he would behave. It would be excessively amusing. You must find it
so to watch Mr. Hudson, eh? Tell me this: do you think he is going to be
a great man--become famous, have his life written, and all that?"

"I don't prophesy, but I have good hopes."

Christina was silent. She stretched out her bare arm and looked at it a
moment absently, turning it so as to see--or almost to see--the dimple
in her elbow. This was apparently a frequent gesture with her; Rowland
had already observed it. It was as coolly and naturally done as if she
had been in her room alone. "So he 's a man of genius," she suddenly
resumed. "Don't you think I ought to be extremely flattered to have a
man of genius perpetually hanging about? He is the first I ever saw,
but I should have known he was not a common mortal. There is something
strange about him. To begin with, he has no manners. You may say that it
's not for me to blame him, for I have none myself. That 's very true,
but the difference is that I can have them when I wish to (and very
charming ones too; I 'll show you some day); whereas Mr. Hudson will
never have them. And yet, somehow, one sees he 's a gentleman. He seems
to have something urging, driving, pushing him, making him restless and
defiant. You see it in his eyes. They are the finest, by the way, I ever
saw. When a person has such eyes as that you can forgive him his bad
manners. I suppose that is what they call the sacred fire."

Rowland made no answer except to ask her in a moment if she would have
another roll. She merely shook her head and went on:--

"Tell me how you found him. Where was he--how was he?"

"He was in a place called Northampton. Did you ever hear of it? He was
studying law--but not learning it."

"It appears it was something horrible, eh?"

"Something horrible?"

"This little village. No society, no pleasures, no beauty, no life."

"You have received a false impression. Northampton is not as gay as
Rome, but Roderick had some charming friends."

"Tell me about them. Who were they?"

"Well, there was my cousin, through whom I made his acquaintance: a
delightful woman."

"Young--pretty?"

"Yes, a good deal of both. And very clever."

"Did he make love to her?"

"Not in the least."

"Well, who else?"

"He lived with his mother. She is the best of women."

"Ah yes, I know all that one's mother is. But she does not count as
society. And who else?"

Rowland hesitated. He wondered whether Christina's insistence was
the result of a general interest in Roderick's antecedents or of a
particular suspicion. He looked at her; she was looking at him a little
askance, waiting for his answer. As Roderick had said nothing about his
engagement to the Cavaliere, it was probable that with this beautiful
girl he had not been more explicit. And yet the thing was announced, it
was public; that other girl was happy in it, proud of it. Rowland felt
a kind of dumb anger rising in his heart. He deliberated a moment
intently.

"What are you frowning at?" Christina asked.

"There was another person," he answered, "the most important of all: the
young girl to whom he is engaged."

Christina stared a moment, raising her eyebrows. "Ah, Mr. Hudson is
engaged?" she said, very simply. "Is she pretty?"

"She is not called a beauty," said Rowland. He meant to practice great
brevity, but in a moment he added, "I have seen beauties, however, who
pleased me less."

"Ah, she pleases you, too? Why don't they marry?"

"Roderick is waiting till he can afford to marry."

Christina slowly put out her arm again and looked at the dimple in her
elbow. "Ah, he 's engaged?" she repeated in the same tone. "He never
told me."

Rowland perceived at this moment that the people about them were
beginning to return to the dancing-room, and immediately afterwards
he saw Roderick making his way toward themselves. Roderick presented
himself before Miss Light.

"I don't claim that you have promised me the cotillon," he said, "but I
consider that you have given me hopes which warrant the confidence that
you will dance with me."

Christina looked at him a moment. "Certainly I have made no promises,"
she said. "It seemed to me that, as the daughter of the house, I should
keep myself free and let it depend on circumstances."

"I beseech you to dance with me!" said Roderick, with vehemence.

Christina rose and began to laugh. "You say that very well, but the
Italians do it better."

This assertion seemed likely to be put to the proof. Mrs. Light hastily
approached, leading, rather than led by, a tall, slim young man, of an
unmistakably Southern physiognomy. "My precious love," she cried, "what
a place to hide in! We have been looking for you for twenty minutes; I
have chosen a cavalier for you, and chosen well!"

The young man disengaged himself, made a ceremonious bow, joined his two
hands, and murmured with an ecstatic smile, "May I venture to hope, dear
signorina, for the honor of your hand?"

"Of course you may!" said Mrs. Light. "The honor is for us."

Christina hesitated but for a moment, then swept the young man a
courtesy as profound as his own bow. "You are very kind, but you are too
late. I have just accepted!"

"Ah, my own darling!" murmured--almost moaned--Mrs. Light.

Christina and Roderick exchanged a single glance--a glance brilliant on
both sides. She passed her hand into his arm; he tossed his clustering
locks and led her away.

A short time afterwards Rowland saw the young man whom she had
rejected leaning against a doorway. He was ugly, but what is called
distinguished-looking. He had a heavy black eye, a sallow complexion, a
long, thin neck; his hair was cropped en brosse. He looked very young,
yet extremely bored. He was staring at the ceiling and stroking an
imperceptible moustache. Rowland espied the Cavaliere Giacosa hard by,
and, having joined him, asked him the young man's name.

"Oh," said the Cavaliere, "he 's a pezzo grosso! A Neapolitan. Prince
Casamassima."

CHAPTER VI. Frascati

One day, on entering Roderick's lodging (not the modest rooms on the
Ripetta which he had first occupied, but a much more sumptuous apartment
on the Corso), Rowland found a letter on the table addressed to himself.
It was from Roderick, and consisted of but three lines: "I am gone to
Frascati--for meditation. If I am not at home on Friday, you had
better join me." On Friday he was still absent, and Rowland went out to
Frascati. Here he found his friend living at the inn and spending his
days, according to his own account, lying under the trees of the Villa
Mondragone, reading Ariosto. He was in a sombre mood; "meditation"
seemed not to have been fruitful. Nothing especially pertinent to our
narrative had passed between the two young men since Mrs. Light's ball,
save a few words bearing on an incident of that entertainment. Rowland
informed Roderick, the next day, that he had told Miss Light of his
engagement. "I don't know whether you 'll thank me," he had said, "but
it 's my duty to let you know it. Miss Light perhaps has already done
so."

Roderick looked at him a moment, intently, with his color slowly
rising. "Why should n't I thank you?" he asked. "I am not ashamed of my
engagement."

"As you had not spoken of it yourself, I thought you might have a reason
for not having it known."

"A man does n't gossip about such a matter with strangers," Roderick
rejoined, with the ring of irritation in his voice.

"With strangers--no!" said Rowland, smiling.

Roderick continued his work; but after a moment, turning round with a
frown: "If you supposed I had a reason for being silent, pray why should
you have spoken?"

"I did not speak idly, my dear Roderick. I weighed the matter before I
spoke, and promised myself to let you know immediately afterwards. It
seemed to me that Miss Light had better know that your affections are
pledged."

"The Cavaliere has put it into your head, then, that I am making love to
her?"

"No; in that case I would not have spoken to her first."

"Do you mean, then, that she is making love to me?"

"This is what I mean," said Rowland, after a pause. "That girl finds you
interesting, and is pleased, even though she may play indifference,
at your finding her so. I said to myself that it might save her some
sentimental disappointment to know without delay that you are not at
liberty to become indefinitely interested in other women."

"You seem to have taken the measure of my liberty with extraordinary
minuteness!" cried Roderick.

"You must do me justice. I am the cause of your separation from Miss
Garland, the cause of your being exposed to temptations which she hardly
even suspects. How could I ever face her," Rowland demanded, with much
warmth of tone, "if at the end of it all she should be unhappy?"

"I had no idea that Miss Garland had made such an impression on you.
You are too zealous; I take it she did n't charge you to look after her
interests."

"If anything happens to you, I am accountable. You must understand
that."

"That 's a view of the situation I can't accept; in your own interest,
no less than in mine. It can only make us both very uncomfortable. I
know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that! But I am not a small boy
nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes
open. When I do well, the merit 's mine; if I do ill, the fault 's mine!
The idea that I make you nervous is detestable. Dedicate your nerves
to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a
quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves."

Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly
his brilliant young friend was without a conscience; now it dimly
occurred to him that he was without a heart. Rowland, as we have already
intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had
gone forth into his relations with Roderick. There had been, from the
first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had
implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick
had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it. Rowland, indeed, had taken
an exquisite satisfaction in his companion's deep, inexpressive assent
to his interest in him. "Here is an uncommonly fine thing," he said to
himself: "a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does
the thing that love alone generally has the credit of--knocks the bottom
out of pride!" His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had
indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection,
his sense of something in his companion's whole personality that
overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an
instant faltered. He listened to Roderick's last words, and then he
smiled as he rarely smiled--with bitterness.

"I don't at all like your telling me I am too zealous," he said. "If I
had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you."

Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle
into the clay. "Say it outright! You have been a great fool to believe
in me."

"I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don't honestly believe I
do!" said Rowland. "It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to
reply to such nonsense."

Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.
Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he
had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled
character--his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal
attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile
petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that,
on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from
having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever,
that all this was but the painful complexity of genius. Rowland, who
had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested
reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous
theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of
genius. Suddenly he felt an irresistible compassion for his companion;
it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a
double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows
at its possessor. Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was
also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius,
accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was
not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing helpless in
the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half
good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle
him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have
a short patience.

"When you err, you say, the fault 's your own," he said at last. "It is
because your faults are your own that I care about them."

Rowland's voice, when he spoke with feeling, had an extraordinary
amenity. Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he
sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder.
"You are the best man in the world," he said, "and I am a vile brute.
Only," he added in a moment, "you don't understand me!" And he looked
at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and
Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one's own
grossness if one failed to read to the bottom of that beautiful soul.

Rowland smiled sadly. "What is it now? Explain."

"Oh, I can't explain!" cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his
work. "I have only one way of expressing my deepest feelings--it 's
this!" And he swung his tool. He stood looking at the half-wrought clay
for a moment, and then flung the instrument down. "And even this half
the time plays me false!"

Rowland felt that his irritation had not subsided, and he himself had no
taste for saying disagreeable things. Nevertheless he saw no sufficient
reason to forbear uttering the words he had had on his conscience from
the beginning. "We must do what we can and be thankful," he said. "And
let me assure you of this--that it won't help you to become entangled
with Miss Light."

Roderick pressed his hand to his forehead with vehemence and then shook
it in the air, despairingly; a gesture that had become frequent with him
since he had been in Italy. "No, no, it 's no use; you don't understand
me! But I don't blame you. You can't!"

"You think it will help you, then?" said Rowland, wondering.

"I think that when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful
works of art, you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action, you
ought to give him a long rope, you ought to let him follow his fancy and
look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it! A mother can't
nurse her child unless she follows a certain diet; an artist can't bring
his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You
demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us that which feeds the
imagination. In labor we must be as passionate as the inspired sibyl; in
life we must be mere machines. It won't do. When you have got an artist
to deal with, you must take him as he is, good and bad together. I don't
say they are pleasant fellows to know or easy fellows to live with; I
don't say they satisfy themselves any better than other people. I only
say that if you want them to produce, you must let them conceive. If
you want a bird to sing, you must not cover up its cage. Shoot them, the
poor devils, drown them, exterminate them, if you will, in the interest
of public morality; it may be morality would gain--I dare say it would!
But if you suffer them to live, let them live on their own terms and
according to their own inexorable needs!"

Rowland burst out laughing. "I have no wish whatever either to shoot you
or to drown you!" he said. "Why launch such a tirade against a warning
offered you altogether in the interest of your freest development?
Do you really mean that you have an inexorable need of embarking on a
flirtation with Miss Light?--a flirtation as to the felicity of which
there may be differences of opinion, but which cannot at best, under the
circumstances, be called innocent. Your last summer's adventures were
more so! As for the terms on which you are to live, I had an idea you
had arranged them otherwise!"

"I have arranged nothing--thank God! I don't pretend to arrange. I
am young and ardent and inquisitive, and I admire Miss Light. That 's
enough. I shall go as far as admiration leads me. I am not afraid. Your
genuine artist may be sometimes half a madman, but he 's not a coward!"

"Suppose that in your speculation you should come to grief, not only
sentimentally but artistically?"

"Come what come will! If I 'm to fizzle out, the sooner I know it the
better. Sometimes I half suspect it. But let me at least go out and
reconnoitre for the enemy, and not sit here waiting for him, cudgeling
my brains for ideas that won't come!"

Do what he would, Rowland could not think of Roderick's theory of
unlimited experimentation, especially as applied in the case under
discussion, as anything but a pernicious illusion. But he saw it was
vain to combat longer, for inclination was powerfully on Roderick's
side. He laid his hand on Roderick's shoulder, looked at him a moment
with troubled eyes, then shook his head mournfully and turned away.

"I can't work any more," said Roderick. "You have upset me! I 'll go
and stroll on the Pincian." And he tossed aside his working-jacket and
prepared himself for the street. As he was arranging his cravat before
the glass, something occurred to him which made him thoughtful. He
stopped a few moments afterward, as they were going out, with his hand
on the door-knob. "You did, from your own point of view, an indiscreet
thing," he said, "to tell Miss Light of my engagement."

Rowland looked at him with a glance which was partly an interrogation,
but partly, also, an admission.

"If she 's the coquette you say," Roderick added, "you have given her a
reason the more."

"And that 's the girl you propose to devote yourself to?" cried Rowland.

"Oh, I don't say it, mind! I only say that she 's the most interesting
creature in the world! The next time you mean to render me a service,
pray give me notice beforehand!"

It was perfectly characteristic of Roderick that, a fortnight later, he
should have let his friend know that he depended upon him for society
at Frascati, as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed
between them. Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a
liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be
displeased with him. It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he
complied with his friend's summons without a moment's hesitation. His
cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was the dupe of his intense
benevolence. She put the case with too little favor, or too much, as the
reader chooses; it is certain, at least, that he had a constitutional
tendency towards magnanimous interpretations. Nothing happened, however,
to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick's
secondary impulses were wiser than his primary ones, and that the
rounded total of his nature had a harmony perfectly attuned to the most
amiable of its brilliant parts. Roderick's humor, for the time, was
pitched in a minor key; he was lazy, listless, and melancholy, but he
had never been more friendly and kindly and appealingly submissive.
Winter had begun, by the calendar, but the weather was divinely mild,
and the two young men took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged
away the mornings in the villas. The villas at Frascati are delicious
places, and replete with romantic suggestiveness. Roderick, as he
had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his
meditations, Rowland was perfectly willing to bear him company and coax
along the process. But Roderick let him know from the first that he was
in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could
think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr.
Leavenworth.

"It is worse out here than in Rome," he said, "for here I am face to
face with the dead blank of my mind! There I could n't think of anything
either, but there I found things to make me forget that I needed to."
This was as frank an allusion to Christina Light as could have been
expected under the circumstances; it seemed, indeed, to Rowland
surprisingly frank, and a pregnant example of his companion's often
strangely irresponsible way of looking at harmful facts. Roderick
was silent sometimes for hours, with a puzzled look on his face and
a constant fold between his even eyebrows; at other times he talked
unceasingly, with a slow, idle, half-nonsensical drawl. Rowland was half
a dozen times on the point of asking him what was the matter with him;
he was afraid he was going to be ill. Roderick had taken a great fancy
to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it
as they strolled in the winter sunshine on the great terrace which looks
toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine mountains. He carried his volume
of Ariosto in his pocket, and took it out every now and then and spouted
half a dozen stanzas to his companion. He was, as a general thing, very
little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the
classics and peruse it for a month in disjointed scraps. He had picked
up Italian without study, and had a wonderfully sympathetic accent,
though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half the lines he
rolled off so sonorously. Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood
everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of
his craft; a sculptor should make a companion of Dante. So he lent him
the Inferno, which he had brought with him, and advised him to look into
it. Roderick took it with some eagerness; perhaps it would brighten
his wits. He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it
intolerably depressing.

"A sculptor should model as Dante writes--you 're right there," he said.
"But when his genius is in eclipse, Dante is a dreadfully smoky lamp.
By what perversity of fate," he went on, "has it come about that I am a
sculptor at all? A sculptor is such a confoundedly special genius; there
are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that bear upon
his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it." (It
may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat
reverse of all this.) "If I had only been a painter--a little quiet,
docile, matter-of-fact painter, like our friend Singleton--I should
only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find color and
attitudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from
the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that
cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples,
at the crags and hollows of the Sabine hills, to find myself grasping
my brush. Best of all would be to be Ariosto himself, or one of his
brotherhood. Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every
form of beauty be part of your stock. You would n't have to look at
things only to say,--with tears of rage half the time,--'Oh, yes, it
's wonderfully pretty, but what the deuce can I do with it?' But a
sculptor, now! That 's a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his
living to make and yet is so damnably constituted that he can't work to
order, and considers that, aesthetically, clock ornaments don't pay! You
can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons
and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can't put the
light into marble--the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that
you get so much of for nothing. Say that a dozen times in his life a man
has a complete sculpturesque vision--a vision in which the imagination
recognizes a subject and the subject kindles the imagination. It is a
remunerative rate of work, and the intervals are comfortable!"

One morning, as the two young men were lounging on the sun-warmed
grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa Mondragone,
Roderick delivered himself of a tissue of lugubrious speculations as to
the possible mischances of one's genius. "What if the watch should run
down," he asked, "and you should lose the key? What if you should wake
up some morning and find it stopped, inexorably, appallingly stopped?
Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have
had to grin and bear it. The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It
bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism. If it
gets out of order we can't mend it; if it breaks down altogether we
can't set it going again. We must let it choose its own pace, and hold
our breath lest it should lose its balance. It 's dealt out in different
doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion
it 's as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more
porridge. Lucky for you if you 've got one of the big cups; we drink
them down in the dark, and we can't tell their size until we tip them
up and hear the last gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of
others for a couple of years. Nay, what are you smiling at so damnably?"
he went on. "Nothing is more common than for an artist who has set out
on his journey on a high-stepping horse to find himself all of a sudden
dismounted and invited to go his way on foot. You can number them by the
thousand--the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose
candle burnt out in a night. Some of them groped their way along without
it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the
wayside to beg. Who shall say that I 'm not one of these? Who shall
assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum? Nothing proves it,
and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of
shaking off the dust of Northampton. If you believed so, my dear fellow,
you did so at your own risk! What am I, what are the best of us, but
an experiment? Do I succeed--do I fail? It does n't depend on me. I 'm
prepared for failure. It won't be a disappointment, simply because I
shan't survive it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When
I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game. I 'm not
making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won't add
insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble. But I have a
conviction that if the hour strikes here," and he tapped his forehead,
"I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud! For the past
ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming
before my eyes. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my
imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!"

Rowland listened to this outbreak, as he often had occasion to listen to
Roderick's heated monologues, with a number of mental restrictions. Both
in gravity and in gayety he said more than he meant, and you did him
simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of
purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a character as his
florid diction implied. The moods of an artist, his exaltations
and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the
pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set
his copy. He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but
he writes a magnificent hand. It was nevertheless true that at present
poor Roderick gave unprecedented tokens of moral stagnation, and as for
genius being held by the precarious tenure he had sketched, Rowland was
at a loss to see whence he could borrow the authority to contradict him.
He sighed to himself, and wished that his companion had a trifle more
of little Sam Singleton's evenness of impulse. But then, was Singleton
a man of genius? He answered that such reflections seemed to him
unprofitable, not to say morbid; that the proof of the pudding was
in the eating; that he did n't know about bringing a genius that had
palpably spent its last breath back to life again, but that he was
satisfied that vigorous effort was a cure for a great many ills that
seemed far gone. "Don't heed your mood," he said, "and don't believe
there is any calm so dead that your own lungs can't ruffle it with a
breeze. If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work
and you will feel like it."

"Set to work and produce abortions!" cried Roderick with ire. "Preach
that to others. Production with me must be either pleasure or nothing.
As I said just now, I must either stay in the saddle or not go at all.
I won't do second-rate work; I can't if I would. I have no cleverness,
apart from inspiration. I am not a Gloriani! You are right," he added
after a while; "this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache. I
shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a bright idea or two."

He turned his face upward to the parasol of the great pine, closed his
eyes, and in a short time forgot his sombre fancies. January though it
was, the mild stillness seemed to vibrate with faint midsummer sounds.
Rowland sat listening to them and wishing that, for the sake of his own
felicity, Roderick's temper were graced with a certain absent ductility.
He was brilliant, but was he, like many brilliant things, brittle?
Suddenly, to his musing sense, the soft atmospheric hum was overscored
with distincter sounds. He heard voices beyond a mass of shrubbery, at
the turn of a neighboring path. In a moment one of them began to seem
familiar, and an instant later a large white poodle emerged into view.
He was slowly followed by his mistress. Miss Light paused a moment on
seeing Rowland and his companion; but, though the former perceived that
he was recognized, she made no bow. Presently she walked directly toward
him. He rose and was on the point of waking Roderick, but she laid
her finger on her lips and motioned him to forbear. She stood a moment
looking at Roderick's handsome slumber.

"What delicious oblivion!" she said. "Happy man! Stenterello"--and she
pointed to his face--"wake him up!"

The poodle extended a long pink tongue and began to lick Roderick's
cheek.

"Why," asked Rowland, "if he is happy?"

"Oh, I want companions in misery! Besides, I want to show off my dog."
Roderick roused himself, sat up, and stared. By this time Mrs. Light had
approached, walking with a gentleman on each side of her. One of these
was the Cavaliere Giacosa; the other was Prince Casamassima. "I should
have liked to lie down on the grass and go to sleep," Christina added.
"But it would have been unheard of."

"Oh, not quite," said the Prince, in English, with a tone of great
precision. "There was already a Sleeping Beauty in the Wood!"

"Charming!" cried Mrs. Light. "Do you hear that, my dear?"

"When the prince says a brilliant thing, it would be a pity to lose it,"
said the young girl. "Your servant, sir!" And she smiled at him with a
grace that might have reassured him, if he had thought her compliment
ambiguous.

Roderick meanwhile had risen to his feet, and Mrs. Light began to
exclaim on the oddity of their meeting and to explain that the day was
so lovely that she had been charmed with the idea of spending it in the
country. And who would ever have thought of finding Mr. Mallet and Mr.
Hudson sleeping under a tree!

"Oh, I beg your pardon; I was not sleeping," said Rowland.

"Don't you know that Mr. Mallet is Mr. Hudson's sheep-dog?" asked
Christina. "He was mounting guard to keep away the wolves."

"To indifferent purpose, madame!" said Rowland, indicating the young
girl.

"Is that the way you spend your time?" Christina demanded of Roderick.
"I never yet happened to learn what men were doing when they supposed
women were not watching them but it was something vastly below their
reputation."

"When, pray," said Roderick, smoothing his ruffled locks, "are women not
watching them?"

"We shall give you something better to do, at any rate. How long have
you been here? It 's an age since I have seen you. We consider you
domiciled here, and expect you to play host and entertain us."

Roderick said that he could offer them nothing but to show them the
great terrace, with its view; and ten minutes later the group was
assembled there. Mrs. Light was extravagant in her satisfaction;
Christina looked away at the Sabine mountains, in silence. The prince
stood by, frowning at the rapture of the elder lady.

"This is nothing," he said at last. "My word of honor. Have you seen the
terrace at San Gaetano?"

"Ah, that terrace," murmured Mrs. Light, amorously. "I suppose it is
magnificent!"

"It is four hundred feet long, and paved with marble. And the view is
a thousand times more beautiful than this. You see, far away, the blue,
blue sea and the little smoke of Vesuvio!"

"Christina, love," cried Mrs. Light forthwith, "the prince has a terrace
four hundred feet long, all paved with marble!"

The Cavaliere gave a little cough and began to wipe his eye-glass.

"Stupendous!" said Christina. "To go from one end to the other, the
prince must have out his golden carriage." This was apparently an
allusion to one of the other items of the young man's grandeur.

"You always laugh at me," said the prince. "I know no more what to say!"

She looked at him with a sad smile and shook her head. "No, no, dear
prince, I don't laugh at you. Heaven forbid! You are much too serious an
affair. I assure you I feel your importance. What did you inform us was
the value of the hereditary diamonds of the Princess Casamassima?"

"Ah, you are laughing at me yet!" said the poor young man, standing
rigid and pale.

"It does n't matter," Christina went on. "We have a note of it; mamma
writes all those things down in a little book!"

"If you are laughed at, dear prince, at least it 's in company," said
Mrs. Light, caressingly; and she took his arm, as if to resist his
possible displacement under the shock of her daughter's sarcasm. But the
prince looked heavy-eyed toward Rowland and Roderick, to whom the
young girl was turning, as if he had much rather his lot were cast with
theirs.

"Is the villa inhabited?" Christina asked, pointing to the vast
melancholy structure which rises above the terrace.

"Not privately," said Roderick. "It is occupied by a Jesuits' college,
for little boys."

"Can women go in?"

"I am afraid not." And Roderick began to laugh. "Fancy the poor little
devils looking up from their Latin declensions and seeing Miss Light
standing there!"

"I should like to see the poor little devils, with their rosy cheeks and
their long black gowns, and when they were pretty, I should n't scruple
to kiss them. But if I can't have that amusement I must have some other.
We must not stand planted on this enchanting terrace as if we were
stakes driven into the earth. We must dance, we must feast, we must do
something picturesque. Mamma has arranged, I believe, that we are to go
back to Frascati to lunch at the inn. I decree that we lunch here and
send the Cavaliere to the inn to get the provisions! He can take the
carriage, which is waiting below."

Miss Light carried out this undertaking with unfaltering ardor. The
Cavaliere was summoned, and he stook to receive her commands hat in
hand, with his eyes cast down, as if she had been a princess addressing
her major-domo. She, however, laid her hand with friendly grace upon his
button-hole, and called him a dear, good old Cavaliere, for being always
so willing. Her spirits had risen with the occasion, and she talked
irresistible nonsense. "Bring the best they have," she said, "no matter
if it ruins us! And if the best is very bad, it will be all the
more amusing. I shall enjoy seeing Mr. Mallet try to swallow it for
propriety's sake! Mr. Hudson will say out like a man that it 's horrible
stuff, and that he 'll be choked first! Be sure you bring a dish of
maccaroni; the prince must have the diet of the Neapolitan nobility. But
I leave all that to you, my poor, dear Cavaliere; you know what 's good!
Only be sure, above all, you bring a guitar. Mr. Mallet will play us
a tune, I 'll dance with Mr. Hudson, and mamma will pair off with the
prince, of whom she is so fond!"

And as she concluded her recommendations, she patted her bland old
servitor caressingly on the shoulder. He looked askance at Rowland; his
little black eye glittered; it seemed to say, "Did n't I tell you she
was a good girl!"

The Cavaliere returned with zealous speed, accompanied by one of the
servants of the inn, laden with a basket containing the materials of a
rustic luncheon. The porter of the villa was easily induced to furnish
a table and half a dozen chairs, and the repast, when set forth, was
pronounced a perfect success; not so good as to fail of the proper
picturesqueness, nor yet so bad as to defeat the proper function of
repasts. Christina continued to display the most charming animation,
and compelled Rowland to reflect privately that, think what one might
of her, the harmonious gayety of a beautiful girl was the most beautiful
sight in nature. Her good-humor was contagious. Roderick, who an hour
before had been descanting on madness and suicide, commingled his
laughter with hers in ardent devotion; Prince Casamassima stroked
his young moustache and found a fine, cool smile for everything; his
neighbor, Mrs. Light, who had Rowland on the other side, made the
friendliest confidences to each of the young men, and the Cavaliere
contributed to the general hilarity by the solemnity of his attention
to his plate. As for Rowland, the spirit of kindly mirth prompted him to
propose the health of this useful old gentleman, as the effective author
of their pleasure. A moment later he wished he had held his tongue, for
although the toast was drunk with demonstrative good-will, the Cavaliere
received it with various small signs of eager self-effacement which
suggested to Rowland that his diminished gentility but half relished
honors which had a flavor of patronage. To perform punctiliously his
mysterious duties toward the two ladies, and to elude or to baffle
observation on his own merits--this seemed the Cavaliere's modest
programme. Rowland perceived that Mrs. Light, who was not always
remarkable for tact, seemed to have divined his humor on this point.
She touched her glass to her lips, but offered him no compliment and
immediately gave another direction to the conversation. He had brought
no guitar, so that when the feast was over there was nothing to hold the
little group together. Christina wandered away with Roderick to another
part of the terrace; the prince, whose smile had vanished, sat gnawing
the head of his cane, near Mrs. Light, and Rowland strolled apart
with the Cavaliere, to whom he wished to address a friendly word in
compensation for the discomfort he had inflicted on his modesty. The
Cavaliere was a mine of information upon all Roman places and people;
he told Rowland a number of curious anecdotes about the old Villa
Mondragone. "If history could always be taught in this fashion!" thought
Rowland. "It 's the ideal--strolling up and down on the very spot
commemorated, hearing sympathetic anecdotes from deeply indigenous
lips." At last, as they passed, Rowland observed the mournful
physiognomy of Prince Casamassima, and, glancing toward the other end of
the terrace, saw that Roderick and Christina had disappeared from view.
The young man was sitting upright, in an attitude, apparently habitual,
of ceremonious rigidity; but his lower jaw had fallen and was propped
up with his cane, and his dull dark eye was fixed upon the angle of the
villa which had just eclipsed Miss Light and her companion. His features
were grotesque and his expression vacuous; but there was a lurking
delicacy in his face which seemed to tell you that nature had been
making Casamassimas for a great many centuries, and, though she adapted
her mould to circumstances, had learned to mix her material to an
extraordinary fineness and to perform the whole operation with extreme
smoothness. The prince was stupid, Rowland suspected, but he imagined
he was amiable, and he saw that at any rate he had the great quality
of regarding himself in a thoroughly serious light. Rowland touched his
companion's arm and pointed to the melancholy nobleman.

"Why in the world does he not go after her and insist on being noticed!"
he asked.

"Oh, he 's very proud!" said the Cavaliere.

"That 's all very well, but a gentleman who cultivates a passion for
that young lady must be prepared to make sacrifices."

"He thinks he has already made a great many. He comes of a very great
family--a race of princes who for six hundred years have married none
but the daughters of princes. But he is seriously in love, and he would
marry her to-morrow."

"And she will not have him?"

"Ah, she is very proud, too!" The Cavaliere was silent a moment, as if
he were measuring the propriety of frankness. He seemed to have formed
a high opinion of Rowland's discretion, for he presently continued:
"It would be a great match, for she brings him neither a name nor a
fortune--nothing but her beauty. But the signorina will receive no
favors; I know her well! She would rather have her beauty blasted than
seem to care about the marriage, and if she ever accepts the prince it
will be only after he has implored her on his knees!"

"But she does care about it," said Rowland, "and to bring him to his
knees she is working upon his jealousy by pretending to be interested in
my friend Hudson. If you said more, you would say that, eh?"

The Cavaliere's shrewdness exchanged a glance with Rowland's. "By no
means. Miss Light is a singular girl; she has many romantic ideas.
She would be quite capable of interesting herself seriously in an
interesting young man, like your friend, and doing her utmost to
discourage a splendid suitor, like the prince. She would act sincerely
and she would go very far. But it would be unfortunate for the young
man," he added, after a pause, "for at the last she would retreat!"

"A singular girl, indeed!"

"She would accept the more brilliant parti. I can answer for it."

"And what would be her motive?"

"She would be forced. There would be circumstances.... I can't tell you
more."

"But this implies that the rejected suitor would also come back. He
might grow tired of waiting."

"Oh, this one is good! Look at him now." Rowland looked, and saw that
the prince had left his place by Mrs. Light and was marching restlessly
to and fro between the villa and the parapet of the terrace. Every now
and then he looked at his watch. "In this country, you know," said the
Cavaliere, "a young lady never goes walking alone with a handsome young
man. It seems to him very strange."

"It must seem to him monstrous, and if he overlooks it he must be very
much in love."

"Oh, he will overlook it. He is far gone."

"Who is this exemplary lover, then; what is he?"

"A Neapolitan; one of the oldest houses in Italy. He is a prince in your
English sense of the word, for he has a princely fortune. He is very
young; he is only just of age; he saw the signorina last winter
in Naples. He fell in love with her from the first, but his family
interfered, and an old uncle, an ecclesiastic, Monsignor B----, hurried
up to Naples, seized him, and locked him up. Meantime he has passed his
majority, and he can dispose of himself. His relations are moving heaven
and earth to prevent his marrying Miss Light, and they have sent us
word that he forfeits his property if he takes his wife out of a certain
line. I have investigated the question minutely, and I find this is but
a fiction to frighten us. He is perfectly free; but the estates are
such that it is no wonder they wish to keep them in their own hands. For
Italy, it is an extraordinary case of unincumbered property. The prince
has been an orphan from his third year; he has therefore had a long
minority and made no inroads upon his fortune. Besides, he is very
prudent and orderly; I am only afraid that some day he will pull the
purse-strings too tight. All these years his affairs have been in the
hands of Monsignor B----, who has managed them to perfection--paid off
mortagages, planted forests, opened up mines. It is now a magnificent
fortune; such a fortune as, with his name, would justify the young man
in pretending to any alliance whatsoever. And he lays it all at the feet
of that young girl who is wandering in yonder boschetto with a penniless
artist."

"He is certainly a phoenix of princes! The signora must be in a state of
bliss."

The Cavaliere looked imperturbably grave. "The signora has a high esteem
for his character."

"His character, by the way," rejoined Rowland, with a smile; "what sort
of a character is it?"

"Eh, Prince Casamassima is a veritable prince! He is a very good young
man. He is not brilliant, nor witty, but he 'll not let himself be made
a fool of. He 's very grave and very devout--though he does propose to
marry a Protestant. He will handle that point after marriage. He 's as
you see him there: a young man without many ideas, but with a very firm
grasp of a single one--the conviction that Prince Casamassima is a very
great person, that he greatly honors any young lady by asking for her
hand, and that things are going very strangely when the young lady
turns her back upon him. The poor young man, I am sure, is profoundly
perplexed. But I whisper to him every day, 'Pazienza, Signor Principe!'"

"So you firmly believe," said Rowland, in conclusion, "that Miss Light
will accept him just in time not to lose him!"

"I count upon it. She would make too perfect a princess to miss her
destiny."

"And you hold that nevertheless, in the mean while, in listening to,
say, my friend Hudson, she will have been acting in good faith?"

The Cavaliere lifted his shoulders a trifle, and gave an inscrutable
smile. "Eh, dear signore, the Christina is very romantic!"

"So much so, you intimate, that she will eventually retract, in
consequence not of a change of sentiment, but of a mysterious outward
pressure?"

"If everything else fails, there is that resource. But it is mysterious,
as you say, and you need n't try to guess it. You will never know."

"The poor signorina, then, will suffer!"

"Not too much, I hope."

"And the poor young man! You maintain that there is nothing but
disappointment in store for the infatuated youth who loses his heart to
her!"

The Cavaliere hesitated. "He had better," he said in a moment, "go and
pursue his studies in Florence. There are very fine antiques in the
Uffizi!"

Rowland presently joined Mrs. Light, to whom her restless protege had
not yet returned. "That 's right," she said; "sit down here; I have
something serious to say to you. I am going to talk to you as a friend.
I want your assistance. In fact, I demand it; it 's your duty to render
it. Look at that unhappy young man."

"Yes," said Rowland, "he seems unhappy."

"He is just come of age, he bears one of the greatest names in Italy and
owns one of the greatest properties, and he is pining away with love for
my daughter."

"So the Cavaliere tells me."

"The Cavaliere should n't gossip," said Mrs. Light dryly. "Such
information should come from me. The prince is pining, as I say; he 's
consumed, he 's devoured. It 's a real Italian passion; I know what that
means!" And the lady gave a speaking glance, which seemed to coquet
for a moment with retrospect. "Meanwhile, if you please, my daughter is
hiding in the woods with your dear friend Mr. Hudson. I could cry with
rage."

"If things are so bad as that," said Rowland, "it seems to me that you
ought to find nothing easier than to dispatch the Cavaliere to bring the
guilty couple back."

"Never in the world! My hands are tied. Do you know what Christina
would do? She would tell the Cavaliere to go about his business--Heaven
forgive her!--and send me word that, if she had a mind to, she would
walk in the woods till midnight. Fancy the Cavaliere coming back and
delivering such a message as that before the prince! Think of a girl
wantonly making light of such a chance as hers! He would marry her
to-morrow, at six o'clock in the morning!"

"It is certainly very sad," said Rowland.

"That costs you little to say. If you had left your precious young
meddler to vegetate in his native village you would have saved me a
world of distress!"

"Nay, you marched into the jaws of danger," said Rowland. "You came and
disinterred poor Hudson in his own secluded studio."

"In an evil hour! I wish to Heaven you would talk with him."

"I have done my best."

"I wish, then, you would take him away. You have plenty of money. Do me
a favor. Take him to travel. Go to the East--go to Timbuctoo. Then, when
Christina is Princess Casamassima," Mrs. Light added in a moment, "he
may come back if he chooses."

"Does she really care for him?" Rowland asked, abruptly.

"She thinks she does, possibly. She is a living riddle. She must needs
follow out every idea that comes into her head. Fortunately, most of
them don't last long; but this one may last long enough to give the
prince a chill. If that were to happen, I don't know what I should do! I
should be the most miserable of women. It would be too cruel, after
all I 've suffered to make her what she is, to see the labor of years
blighted by a caprice. For I can assure you, sir," Mrs. Light went on,
"that if my daughter is the greatest beauty in the world, some of the
credit is mine."

Rowland promptly remarked that this was obvious. He saw that the lady's
irritated nerves demanded comfort from flattering reminiscence, and
he assumed designedly the attitude of a zealous auditor. She began
to retail her efforts, her hopes, her dreams, her presentiments, her
disappointments, in the cause of her daughter's matrimonial fortunes. It
was a long story, and while it was being unfolded, the prince continued
to pass to and fro, stiffly and solemnly, like a pendulum marking
the time allowed for the young lady to come to her senses. Mrs. Light
evidently, at an early period, had gathered her maternal hopes into
a sacred sheaf, which she said her prayers and burnt incense to, and
treated like a sort of fetish. They had been her religion; she had none
other, and she performed her devotions bravely and cheerily, in the
light of day. The poor old fetish had been so caressed and manipulated,
so thrust in and out of its niche, so passed from hand to hand, so
dressed and undressed, so mumbled and fumbled over, that it had lost by
this time much of its early freshness, and seemed a rather battered
and disfeatured divinity. But it was still brought forth in moments of
trouble to have its tinseled petticoat twisted about and be set up
on its altar. Rowland observed that Mrs. Light had a genuine maternal
conscience; she considered that she had been performing a sacred duty in
bringing up Christina to set her cap for a prince, and when the future
looked dark, she found consolation in thinking that destiny could never
have the heart to deal a blow at so deserving a person. This conscience
upside down presented to Rowland's fancy a real physical image; he was
on the point, half a dozen times, of bursting out laughing.

"I don't know whether you believe in presentiments," said Mrs. Light,
"and I don't care! I have had one for the last fifteen years. People
have laughed at it, but they have n't laughed me out of it. It has been
everything to me. I could n't have lived without it. One must believe in
something! It came to me in a flash, when Christina was five years old.
I remember the day and the place, as if it were yesterday. She was a
very ugly baby; for the first two years I could hardly bear to look at
her, and I used to spoil my own looks with crying about her. She had an
Italian nurse who was very fond of her and insisted that she would grow
up pretty. I could n't believe her; I used to contradict her, and we
were forever squabbling. I was just a little silly in those days--surely
I may say it now--and I was very fond of being amused. If my daughter
was ugly, it was not that she resembled her mamma; I had no lack of
amusement. People accused me, I believe, of neglecting my little girl;
if it was so, I 've made up for it since. One day I went to drive on the
Pincio in very low spirits. A trusted friend had greatly disappointed
me. While I was there he passed me in a carriage, driving with a
horrible woman who had made trouble between us. I got out of my carriage
to walk about, and at last sat down on a bench. I can show you the spot
at this hour. While I sat there a child came wandering along the path--a
little girl of four or five, very fantastically dressed in crimson and
orange. She stopped in front of me and stared at me, and I stared at her
queer little dress, which was a cheap imitation of the costume of one
of these contadine. At last I looked up at her face, and said to myself,
'Bless me, what a beautiful child! what a splendid pair of eyes, what a
magnificent head of hair! If my poor Christina were only like that!' The
child turned away slowly, but looking back with its eyes fixed on me.
All of a sudden I gave a cry, pounced on it, pressed it in my arms,
and covered it with kisses. It was Christina, my own precious child, so
disguised by the ridiculous dress which the nurse had amused herself in
making for her, that her own mother had not recognized her. She knew me,
but she said afterwards that she had not spoken to me because I looked
so angry. Of course my face was sad. I rushed with my child to the
carriage, drove home post-haste, pulled off her rags, and, as I may say,
wrapped her in cotton. I had been blind, I had been insane; she was
a creature in ten millions, she was to be a beauty of beauties, a
priceless treasure! Every day, after that, the certainty grew. From that
time I lived only for my daughter. I watched her, I caressed her from
morning till night, I worshipped her. I went to see doctors about her,
I took every sort of advice. I was determined she should be perfection.
The things that have been done for that girl, sir--you would n't believe
them; they would make you smile! Nothing was spared; if I had been told
that she must have a bath every morning of molten pearls, I would have
found means to give it to her. She never raised a finger for herself,
she breathed nothing but perfumes, she walked upon velvet. She never
was out of my sight, and from that day to this I have never said a sharp
word to her. By the time she was ten years old she was beautiful as an
angel, and so noticed wherever we went that I had to make her wear a
veil, like a woman of twenty. Her hair reached down to her feet; her
hands were the hands of a princess. Then I saw that she was as clever
as she was beautiful, and that she had only to play her cards. She had
masters, professors, every educational advantage. They told me she was
a little prodigy. She speaks French, Italian, German, better than
most natives. She has a wonderful genius for music, and might make her
fortune as a pianist, if it was not made for her otherwise! I traveled
all over Europe; every one told me she was a marvel. The director of the
opera in Paris saw her dance at a child's party at Spa, and offered
me an enormous sum if I would give her up to him and let him have her
educated for the ballet. I said, 'No, I thank you, sir; she is meant
to be something finer than a princesse de theatre.' I had a passionate
belief that she might marry absolutely whom she chose, that she might be
a princess out and out. It has never left me till this hour, and I can
assure you that it has sustained me in many embarrassments. Financial,
some of them; I don't mind confessing it! I have raised money on that
girl's face! I 've taken her to the Jews and bade her put up her veil,
and asked if the mother of that young lady was not safe! She, of course,
was too young to understand me. And yet, as a child, you would have said
she knew what was in store for her; before she could read, she had the
manners, the tastes, the instincts of a little princess. She would have
nothing to do with shabby things or shabby people; if she stained one of
her frocks, she was seized with a kind of frenzy and tore it to pieces.
At Nice, at Baden, at Brighton, wherever we stayed, she used to be sent
for by all the great people to play with their children. She has played
at kissing-games with people who now stand on the steps of thrones! I
have gone so far as to think at times that those childish kisses were a
sign--a symbol--a portent. You may laugh at me if you like, but have n't
such things happened again and again without half as good a cause, and
does n't history notoriously repeat itself? There was a little Spanish
girl at a second-rate English boarding-school thirty years ago!... The
Empress certainly is a pretty woman; but what is my Christina, pray? I
've dreamt of it, sometimes every night for a month. I won't tell you
I have been to consult those old women who advertise in the newspapers;
you 'll call me an old imbecile. Imbecile if you please! I have refused
magnificent offers because I believed that somehow or other--if wars and
revolutions were needed to bring it about--we should have nothing less
than that. There might be another coup d'etat somewhere, and another
brilliant young sovereign looking out for a wife! At last, however,"
Mrs. Light proceeded with incomparable gravity, "since the overturning
of the poor king of Naples and that charming queen, and the expulsion
of all those dear little old-fashioned Italian grand-dukes, and the
dreadful radical talk that is going on all over the world, it has come
to seem to me that with Christina in such a position I should be really
very nervous. Even in such a position she would hold her head very high,
and if anything should happen to her, she would make no concessions
to the popular fury. The best thing, if one is prudent, seems to be a
nobleman of the highest possible rank, short of belonging to a reigning
stock. There you see one striding up and down, looking at his watch, and
counting the minutes till my daughter reappears!"

Rowland listened to all this with a huge compassion for the heroine of
the tale. What an education, what a history, what a school of character
and of morals! He looked at the prince and wondered whether he too had
heard Mrs. Light's story. If he had he was a brave man. "I certainly
hope you 'll keep him," he said to Mrs. Light. "You have played a
dangerous game with your daughter; it would be a pity not to win. But
there is hope for you yet; here she comes at last!"

Christina reappeared as he spoke these words, strolling beside her
companion with the same indifferent tread with which she had departed.
Rowland imagined that there was a faint pink flush in her cheek which
she had not carried away with her, and there was certainly a light in
Roderick's eyes which he had not seen there for a week.

"Bless my soul, how they are all looking at us!" she cried, as they
advanced. "One would think we were prisoners of the Inquisition!" And
she paused and glanced from the prince to her mother, and from
Rowland to the Cavaliere, and then threw back her head and burst into
far-ringing laughter. "What is it, pray? Have I been very improper? Am I
ruined forever? Dear prince, you are looking at me as if I had committed
the unpardonable sin!"

"I myself," said the prince, "would never have ventured to ask you to
walk with me alone in the country for an hour!"

"The more fool you, dear prince, as the vulgar say! Our walk has been
charming. I hope you, on your side, have enjoyed each other's society."

"My dear daughter," said Mrs. Light, taking the arm of her predestined
son-in-law, "I shall have something serious to say to you when we reach
home. We will go back to the carriage."

"Something serious! Decidedly, it is the Inquisition. Mr. Hudson,
stand firm, and let us agree to make no confessions without conferring
previously with each other! They may put us on the rack first. Mr.
Mallet, I see also," Christina added, "has something serious to say to
me!"

Rowland had been looking at her with the shadow of his lately-stirred
pity in his eyes. "Possibly," he said. "But it must be for some other
time."

"I am at your service. I see our good-humor is gone. And I only wanted
to be amiable! It is very discouraging. Cavaliere, you, only, look as if
you had a little of the milk of human kindness left; from your venerable
visage, at least; there is no telling what you think. Give me your arm
and take me away!"

The party took its course back to the carriage, which was waiting in
the grounds of the villa, and Rowland and Roderick bade their friends
farewell. Christina threw herself back in her seat and closed her eyes;
a manoeuvre for which Rowland imagined the prince was grateful, as it
enabled him to look at her without seeming to depart from his attitude
of distinguished disapproval. Rowland found himself aroused from sleep
early the next morning, to see Roderick standing before him, dressed for
departure, with his bag in his hand. "I am off," he said. "I am back to
work. I have an idea. I must strike while the iron 's hot! Farewell!"
And he departed by the first train. Rowland went alone by the next.

CHAPTER VII. Saint Cecilia's

Rowland went often to the Coliseum; he never wearied of it. One morning,
about a month after his return from Frascati, as he was strolling across
the vast arena, he observed a young woman seated on one of the fragments
of stone which are ranged along the line of the ancient parapet. It
seemed to him that he had seen her before, but he was unable to localize
her face. Passing her again, he perceived that one of the little
red-legged French soldiers at that time on guard there had approached
her and was gallantly making himself agreeable. She smiled brilliantly,
and Rowland recognized the smile (it had always pleased him) of a
certain comely Assunta, who sometimes opened the door for Mrs. Light's
visitors. He wondered what she was doing alone in the Coliseum, and
conjectured that Assunta had admirers as well as her young mistress, but
that, being without the same domiciliary conveniencies, she was using
this massive heritage of her Latin ancestors as a boudoir. In other
words, she had an appointment with her lover, who had better, from
present appearances, be punctual. It was a long time since Rowland had
ascended to the ruinous upper tiers of the great circus, and, as the day
was radiant and the distant views promised to be particularly clear,
he determined to give himself the pleasure. The custodian unlocked the
great wooden wicket, and he climbed through the winding shafts, where
the eager Roman crowds had billowed and trampled, not pausing till he
reached the highest accessible point of the ruin. The views were as fine
as he had supposed; the lights on the Sabine Mountains had never been
more lovely. He gazed to his satisfaction and retraced his steps. In
a moment he paused again on an abutment somewhat lower, from which
the glance dropped dizzily into the interior. There are chance
anfractuosities of ruin in the upper portions of the Coliseum which
offer a very fair imitation of the rugged face of an Alpine cliff. In
those days a multitude of delicate flowers and sprays of wild herbage
had found a friendly soil in the hoary crevices, and they bloomed and
nodded amid the antique masonry as freely as they would have done in the
virgin rock. Rowland was turning away, when he heard a sound of voices
rising up from below. He had but to step slightly forward to find
himself overlooking two persons who had seated themselves on a narrow
ledge, in a sunny corner. They had apparently had an eye to extreme
privacy, but they had not observed that their position was commanded by
Rowland's stand-point. One of these airy adventurers was a lady, thickly
veiled, so that, even if he had not been standing directly above her,
Rowland could not have seen her face. The other was a young man, whose
face was also invisible, but who, as Rowland stood there, gave a toss
of his clustering locks which was equivalent to the signature--Roderick
Hudson. A moment's reflection, hereupon, satisfied him of the identity
of the lady. He had been unjust to poor Assunta, sitting patient in the
gloomy arena; she had not come on her own errand. Rowland's discoveries
made him hesitate. Should he retire as noiselessly as possible, or
should he call out a friendly good morning? While he was debating the
question, he found himself distinctly hearing his friends' words. They
were of such a nature as to make him unwilling to retreat, and yet
to make it awkward to be discovered in a position where it would be
apparent that he had heard them.

"If what you say is true," said Christina, with her usual soft
deliberateness--it made her words rise with peculiar distinctness to
Rowland's ear--"you are simply weak. I am sorry! I hoped--I really
believed--you were not."

"No, I am not weak," answered Roderick, with vehemence; "I maintain that
I am not weak! I am incomplete, perhaps; but I can't help that. Weakness
is a man's own fault!"

"Incomplete, then!" said Christina, with a laugh. "It 's the same thing,
so long as it keeps you from splendid achievement. Is it written, then,
that I shall really never know what I have so often dreamed of?"

"What have you dreamed of?"

"A man whom I can perfectly respect!" cried the young girl, with a
sudden flame. "A man, at least, whom I can unrestrictedly admire. I meet
one, as I have met more than one before, whom I fondly believe to be
cast in a larger mould than most of the vile human breed, to be large
in character, great in talent, strong in will! In such a man as that,
I say, one's weary imagination at last may rest; or it may wander if it
will, yet never need to wander far from the deeps where one's heart is
anchored. When I first knew you, I gave no sign, but you had struck
me. I observed you, as women observe, and I fancied you had the sacred
fire."

"Before heaven, I believe I have!" cried Roderick.

"Ah, but so little! It flickers and trembles and sputters; it goes out,
you tell me, for whole weeks together. From your own account, it 's ten
to one that in the long run you 're a failure."

"I say those things sometimes myself, but when I hear you say them they
make me feel as if I could work twenty years at a sitting, on purpose to
refute you!"

"Ah, the man who is strong with what I call strength," Christina
replied, "would neither rise nor fall by anything I could say! I am a
poor, weak woman; I have no strength myself, and I can give no strength.
I am a miserable medley of vanity and folly. I am silly, I am ignorant,
I am affected, I am false. I am the fruit of a horrible education, sown
on a worthless soil. I am all that, and yet I believe I have one merit!
I should know a great character when I saw it, and I should delight in
it with a generosity which would do something toward the remission of
my sins. For a man who should really give me a certain feeling--which
I have never had, but which I should know when it came--I would send
Prince Casamassima and his millions to perdition. I don't know what you
think of me for saying all this; I suppose we have not climbed up here
under the skies to play propriety. Why have you been at such pains to
assure me, after all, that you are a little man and not a great one, a
weak one and not a strong? I innocently imagined that your eyes declared
you were strong. But your voice condemns you; I always wondered at it;
it 's not the voice of a conqueror!"

"Give me something to conquer," cried Roderick, "and when I say that I
thank you from my soul, my voice, whatever you think of it, shall speak
the truth!"

Christina for a moment said nothing. Rowland was too interested to think
of moving. "You pretend to such devotion," she went on, "and yet I
am sure you have never really chosen between me and that person in
America."

"Do me the favor not to speak of her," said Roderick, imploringly.

"Why not? I say no ill of her, and I think all kinds of good. I am
certain she is a far better girl than I, and far more likely to make you
happy."

"This is happiness, this present, palpable moment," said Roderick;
"though you have such a genius for saying the things that torture me!"

"It 's greater happiness than you deserve, then! You have never chosen,
I say; you have been afraid to choose. You have never really faced the
fact that you are false, that you have broken your faith. You have never
looked at it and seen that it was hideous, and yet said, 'No matter, I
'll brave the penalty, I 'll bear the shame!' You have closed your eyes;
you have tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were
not behaving as badly as you seemed to be, and there would be some
way, after all, of compassing bliss and yet escaping trouble. You have
faltered and drifted, you have gone on from accident to accident, and I
am sure that at this present moment you can't tell what it is you really
desire!"

Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent, and his hands
clapsed around his legs. He bent his head and rested his forehead on his
knees.

Christina went on with a sort of infernal calmness: "I believe that,
really, you don't greatly care for your friend in America any more than
you do for me. You are one of the men who care only for themselves and
for what they can make of themselves. That 's very well when they
can make something great, and I could interest myself in a man of
extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his passions to account.
But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary?
Fancy feeling one's self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent! If
you have doubts about yourself, I can't reassure you; I have too many
doubts myself, about everything in this weary world. You have gone up
like a rocket, in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come
down like the stick? I don't pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I
have said before--that all modern sculpture seems to me weak, and that
the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques
of the Vatican. No, no, I can't reassure you; and when you tell
me--with a confidence in my discretion of which, certainly, I am duly
sensible--that at times you feel terribly small, why, I can only answer,
'Ah, then, my poor friend, I am afraid you are small.' The language I
should like to hear, from a certain person, would be the language of
absolute decision."

Roderick raised his head, but he said nothing; he seemed to be
exchanging a long glance with his companion. The result of it was
to make him fling himself back with an inarticulate murmur. Rowland,
admonished by the silence, was on the point of turning away, but he was
arrested by a gesture of the young girl. She pointed for a moment into
the blue air. Roderick followed the direction of her gesture.

"Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche," she
asked, "as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?" She spoke
apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a
less painful channel.

Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant--a delicate
plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment
of wall some twenty feet from Christina's place.

Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering. At last,
glancing round, "Put up your veil!" he said. Christina complied. "Does
it look as blue now?" he asked.

"Ah, what a lovely color!" she murmured, leaning her head on one side.

"Would you like to have it?"

She stared a moment and then broke into a light laugh.

"Would you like to have it?" he repeated in a ringing voice.

"Don't look as if you would eat me up," she answered. "It 's harmless if
I say yes!"

Roderick rose to his feet and stood looking at the little flower. It
was separated from the ledge on which he stood by a rugged surface of
vertical wall, which dropped straight into the dusky vaults behind the
arena. Suddenly he took off his hat and flung it behind him. Christina
then sprang to her feet.

"I will bring it you," he said.

She seized his arm. "Are you crazy? Do you mean to kill yourself?"

"I shall not kill myself. Sit down!"

"Excuse me. Not till you do!" And she grasped his arm with both hands.

Roderick shook her off and pointed with a violent gesture to her former
place. "Go there!" he cried fiercely.

"You can never, never!" she murmured beseechingly, clasping her hands.
"I implore you!"

Roderick turned and looked at her, and then in a voice which Rowland had
never heard him use, a voice almost thunderous, a voice which awakened
the echoes of the mighty ruin, he repeated, "Sit down!" She hesitated
a moment and then she dropped on the ground and buried her face in her
hands.

Rowland had seen all this, and he saw more. He saw Roderick clasp in
his left arm the jagged corner of the vertical partition along which he
proposed to pursue his crazy journey, stretch out his leg, and feel for
a resting-place for his foot. Rowland had measured with a glance the
possibility of his sustaining himself, and pronounced it absolutely nil.
The wall was garnished with a series of narrow projections, the remains
apparently of a brick cornice supporting the arch of a vault which had
long since collapsed. It was by lodging his toes on these loose brackets
and grasping with his hands at certain mouldering protuberances on a
level with his head, that Roderick intended to proceed. The relics of
the cornice were utterly worthless as a support. Rowland had observed
this, and yet, for a moment, he had hesitated. If the thing were
possible, he felt a sudden admiring glee at the thought of Roderick's
doing it. It would be finely done, it would be gallant, it would have
a sort of masculine eloquence as an answer to Christina's sinister
persiflage. But it was not possible! Rowland left his place with a
bound, and scrambled down some neighboring steps, and the next moment
a stronger pair of hands than Christina's were laid upon Roderick's
shoulder.

He turned, staring, pale and angry. Christina rose, pale and staring,
too, but beautiful in her wonder and alarm. "My dear Roderick," said
Rowland, "I am only preventing you from doing a very foolish thing. That
's an exploit for spiders, not for young sculptors of promise."

Roderick wiped his forehead, looked back at the wall, and then closed
his eyes, as if with a spasm, of retarded dizziness. "I won't resist
you," he said. "But I have made you obey," he added, turning to
Christina. "Am I weak now?"

She had recovered her composure; she looked straight past him and
addressed Rowland: "Be so good as to show me the way out of this
horrible place!"

He helped her back into the corridor; Roderick followed after a short
interval. Of course, as they were descending the steps, came questions
for Rowland to answer, and more or less surprise. Where had he come
from? how happened he to have appeared at just that moment? Rowland
answered that he had been rambling overhead, and that, looking out of an
aperture, he had seen a gentleman preparing to undertake a preposterous
gymnastic feat, and a lady swooning away in consequence. Interference
seemed justifiable, and he had made it as prompt as possible. Roderick
was far from hanging his head, like a man who has been caught in the
perpetration of an extravagant folly; but if he held it more erect than
usual Rowland believed that this was much less because he had made
a show of personal daring than because he had triumphantly proved to
Christina that, like a certain person she had dreamed of, he too could
speak the language of decision. Christina descended to the arena in
silence, apparently occupied with her own thoughts. She betrayed
no sense of the privacy of her interview with Roderick needing an
explanation. Rowland had seen stranger things in New York! The only
evidence of her recent agitation was that, on being joined by her maid,
she declared that she was unable to walk home; she must have a carriage.
A fiacre was found resting in the shadow of the Arch of Constantine,
and Rowland suspected that after she had got into it she disburdened
herself, under her veil, of a few natural tears.

Rowland had played eavesdropper to so good a purpose that he might
justly have omitted the ceremony of denouncing himself to Roderick. He
preferred, however, to let him know that he had overheard a portion of
his talk with Christina.

"Of course it seems to you," Roderick said, "a proof that I am utterly
infatuated."

"Miss Light seemed to me to know very well how far she could go,"
Rowland answered. "She was twisting you round her finger. I don't think
she exactly meant to defy you; but your crazy pursuit of that flower
was a proof that she could go all lengths in the way of making a fool of
you."

"Yes," said Roderick, meditatively; "she is making a fool of me."

"And what do you expect to come of it?"

"Nothing good!" And Roderick put his hands into his pockets and looked
as if he had announced the most colorless fact in the world.

"And in the light of your late interview, what do you make of your young
lady?"

"If I could tell you that, it would be plain sailing. But she 'll not
tell me again I am weak!"

"Are you very sure you are not weak?"

"I may be, but she shall never know it."

Rowland said no more until they reached the Corso, when he asked his
companion whether he was going to his studio.

Roderick started out of a reverie and passed his hands over his eyes.
"Oh no, I can't settle down to work after such a scene as that. I was
not afraid of breaking my neck then, but I feel all in a tremor now. I
will go--I will go and sit in the sun on the Pincio!"

"Promise me this, first," said Rowland, very solemnly: "that the next
time you meet Miss Light, it shall be on the earth and not in the air."

Since his return from Frascati, Roderick had been working doggedly at
the statue ordered by Mr. Leavenworth. To Rowland's eye he had made a
very fair beginning, but he had himself insisted, from the first, that
he liked neither his subject nor his patron, and that it was impossible
to feel any warmth of interest in a work which was to be incorporated
into the ponderous personality of Mr. Leavenworth. It was all against
the grain; he wrought without love. Nevertheless after a fashion he
wrought, and the figure grew beneath his hands. Miss Blanchard's friend
was ordering works of art on every side, and his purveyors were in many
cases persons whom Roderick declared it was infamy to be paired with.
There had been grand tailors, he said, who declined to make you a coat
unless you got the hat you were to wear with it from an artist of their
own choosing. It seemed to him that he had an equal right to exact that
his statue should not form part of the same system of ornament as the
"Pearl of Perugia," a picture by an American confrere who had, in Mr.
Leavenworth's opinion, a prodigious eye for color. As a customer, Mr.
Leavenworth used to drop into Roderick's studio, to see how things
were getting on, and give a friendly hint or so. He would seat himself
squarely, plant his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held
very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate
the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you
might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant
and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating
beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that
the good gentleman's placid vanity had an integument whose toughness no
sarcastic shaft could pierce. Roderick admitted that in thinking
over the tribulations of struggling genius, the danger of dying of
over-patronage had never occurred to him.

The deterring effect of the episode of the Coliseum was apparently of
long continuance; if Roderick's nerves had been shaken his hand needed
time to recover its steadiness. He cultivated composure upon principles
of his own; by frequenting entertainments from which he returned at four
o'clock in the morning, and lapsing into habits which might fairly be
called irregular. He had hitherto made few friends among the artistic
fraternity; chiefly because he had taken no trouble about it, and
there was in his demeanor an elastic independence of the favor of his
fellow-mortals which made social advances on his own part peculiarly
necessary. Rowland had told him more than once that he ought to
fraternize a trifle more with the other artists, and he had always
answered that he had not the smallest objection to fraternizing:
let them come! But they came on rare occasions, and Roderick was not
punctilious about returning their visits. He declared there was not one
of them whose works gave him the smallest desire to make acquaintance
with the insides of their heads. For Gloriani he professed a superb
contempt, and, having been once to look at his wares, never crossed
his threshold again. The only one of the fraternity for whom by his own
admission he cared a straw was little Singleton; but he expressed his
regard only in a kind of sublime hilarity whenever he encountered this
humble genius, and quite forgot his existence in the intervals. He had
never been to see him, but Singleton edged his way, from time to time,
timidly, into Roderick's studio, and agreed with characteristic modesty
that brilliant fellows like the sculptor might consent to receive
homage, but could hardly be expected to render it. Roderick never
exactly accepted homage, and apparently did not quite observe whether
poor Singleton spoke in admiration or in blame. Roderick's taste as to
companions was singularly capricious. There were very good fellows, who
were disposed to cultivate him, who bored him to death; and there were
others, in whom even Rowland's good-nature was unable to discover a
pretext for tolerance, in whom he appeared to find the highest social
qualities. He used to give the most fantastic reasons for his likes and
dislikes. He would declare he could n't speak a civil word to a man
who brushed his hair in a certain fashion, and he would explain his
unaccountable fancy for an individual of imperceptible merit by telling
you that he had an ancestor who in the thirteenth century had walled up
his wife alive. "I like to talk to a man whose ancestor has walled up
his wife alive," he would say. "You may not see the fun of it, and think
poor P---- is a very dull fellow. It 's very possible; I don't ask you
to admire him. But, for reasons of my own, I like to have him about. The
old fellow left her for three days with her face uncovered, and placed
a long mirror opposite to her, so that she could see, as he said, if her
gown was a fit!"

His relish for an odd flavor in his friends had led him to make the
acquaintance of a number of people outside of Rowland's well-ordered
circle, and he made no secret of their being very queer fish. He formed
an intimacy, among others, with a crazy fellow who had come to Rome
as an emissary of one of the Central American republics, to drive some
ecclesiastical bargain with the papal government. The Pope had given him
the cold shoulder, but since he had not prospered as a diplomatist, he
had sought compensation as a man of the world, and his great flamboyant
curricle and negro lackeys were for several weeks one of the striking
ornaments of the Pincian. He spoke a queer jargon of Italian, Spanish,
French, and English, humorously relieved with scraps of ecclesiastical
Latin, and to those who inquired of Roderick what he found to interest
him in such a fantastic jackanapes, the latter would reply, looking
at his interlocutor with his lucid blue eyes, that it was worth any
sacrifice to hear him talk nonsense! The two had gone together one night
to a ball given by a lady of some renown in the Spanish colony, and very
late, on his way home, Roderick came up to Rowland's rooms, in whose
windows he had seen a light. Rowland was going to bed, but Roderick
flung himself into an armchair and chattered for an hour. The friends of
the Costa Rican envoy were as amusing as himself, and in very much the
same line. The mistress of the house had worn a yellow satin dress, and
gold heels to her slippers, and at the close of the entertainment had
sent for a pair of castanets, tucked up her petticoats, and danced a
fandango, while the gentlemen sat cross-legged on the floor. "It was
awfully low," Roderick said; "all of a sudden I perceived it, and
bolted. Nothing of that kind ever amuses me to the end: before it 's
half over it bores me to death; it makes me sick. Hang it, why can't a
poor fellow enjoy things in peace? My illusions are all broken-winded;
they won't carry me twenty paces! I can't laugh and forget; my
laugh dies away before it begins. Your friend Stendhal writes on his
book-covers (I never got farther) that he has seen too early in life la
beaute parfaite. I don't know how early he saw it; I saw it before I was
born--in another state of being! I can't describe it positively; I can
only say I don't find it anywhere now. Not at the bottom of champagne
glasses; not, strange as it may seem, in that extra half-yard or so of
shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose. I
don't find it at merry supper-tables, where half a dozen ugly men with
pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; not
when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets, and go
out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there
like gnawed bones stuck into the earth. Everything is mean and dusky
and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant
society are the meanest and shabbiest of all. They have no real
spontaneity; they are all cowards and popinjays. They have no more
dignity than so many grasshoppers. Nothing is good but one!" And he