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Roderick Hudson
Miss Light looked for some moments at Roderick’s statues. “Yes,” she said, “they are not so silly as most of the things we have seen. They have no chic, and yet they are beautiful.”
“You describe them perfectly,” said Rowland. “They are beautiful, and yet they have no chic. That ‘s it!”
“If he will promise to put none into my bust, I have a mind to let him make it. A request made in those terms deserves to be granted.”
“In what terms?”
“Did n’t you hear him? ‘Mademoiselle, you almost satisfy my conception of the beautiful. I must model your bust.’ That almost should be rewarded. He is like me; he likes to face the truth. I think we should get on together.”
The Cavaliere approached Rowland, to express the pleasure he had derived from his beautiful “collection.” His smile was exquisitely bland, his accent appealing, caressing, insinuating. But he gave Rowland an odd sense of looking at a little waxen image, adjusted to perform certain gestures and emit certain sounds. It had once contained a soul, but the soul had leaked out. Nevertheless, Rowland reflected, there are more profitless things than mere sound and gesture, in a consummate Italian. And the Cavaliere, too, had soul enough left to desire to speak a few words on his own account, and call Rowland’s attention to the fact that he was not, after all, a hired cicerone, but an ancient Roman gentleman. Rowland felt sorry for him; he hardly knew why. He assured him in a friendly fashion that he must come again; that his house was always at his service. The Cavaliere bowed down to the ground. “You do me too much honor,” he murmured. “If you will allow me—it is not impossible!”
Mrs. Light, meanwhile, had prepared to depart. “If you are not afraid to come and see two quiet little women, we shall be most happy!” she said. “We have no statues nor pictures—we have nothing but each other. Eh, darling?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Christina.
“Oh, and the Cavaliere,” added her mother.
“The poodle, please!” cried the young girl.
Rowland glanced at the Cavaliere; he was smiling more blandly than ever.
A few days later Rowland presented himself, as civility demanded, at Mrs. Light’s door. He found her living in one of the stately houses of the Via dell’ Angelo Custode, and, rather to his surprise, was told she was at home. He passed through half a dozen rooms and was ushered into an immense saloon, at one end of which sat the mistress of the establishment, with a piece of embroidery. She received him very graciously, and then, pointing mysteriously to a large screen which was unfolded across the embrasure of one of the deep windows, “I am keeping guard!” she said. Rowland looked interrogative; whereupon she beckoned him forward and motioned him to look behind the screen. He obeyed, and for some moments stood gazing. Roderick, with his back turned, stood before an extemporized pedestal, ardently shaping a formless mass of clay. Before him sat Christina Light, in a white dress, with her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a classic coil, and her head admirably poised. Meeting Rowland’s gaze, she smiled a little, only with her deep gray eyes, without moving. She looked divinely beautiful.
CHAPTER V. Christina
The brilliant Roman winter came round again, and Rowland enjoyed it, in a certain way, more deeply than before. He grew at last to feel that sense of equal possession, of intellectual nearness, which it belongs to the peculiar magic of the ancient city to infuse into minds of a cast that she never would have produced. He became passionately, unreasoningly fond of all Roman sights and sensations, and to breathe the Roman atmosphere began to seem a needful condition of being. He could not have defined and explained the nature of his great love, nor have made up the sum of it by the addition of his calculable pleasures. It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps the most pertinent thing that may be said is that it enforced a sort of oppressive reconciliation to the present, the actual, the sensuous—to life on the terms that there offered themselves. It was perhaps for this very reason that, in spite of the charm which Rome flings over one’s mood, there ran through Rowland’s meditations an undertone of melancholy, natural enough in a mind which finds its horizon insidiously limited to the finite, even in very picturesque forms. Whether it is one that tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for the precious gift, one must do without it altogether; or whether in an atmosphere so heavily weighted with echoes and memories one grows to believe that there is nothing in one’s consciousness that is not foredoomed to moulder and crumble and become dust for the feet, and possible malaria for the lungs, of future generations—the fact at least remains that one parts half-willingly with one’s hopes in Rome, and misses them only under some very exceptional stress of circumstance. For this reason one may perhaps say that there is no other place in which one’s daily temper has such a mellow serenity, and none, at the same time, in which acute attacks of depression are more intolerable. Rowland found, in fact, a perfect response to his prevision that to live in Rome was an education to one’s senses and one’s imagination, but he sometimes wondered whether this was not a questionable gain in case of one’s not being prepared to live wholly by one’s imagination and one’s senses. The tranquil profundity of his daily satisfaction seemed sometimes to turn, by a mysterious inward impulse, and face itself with questioning, admonishing, threatening eyes. “But afterwards…?” it seemed to ask, with a long reverberation; and he could give no answer but a shy affirmation that there was no such thing as afterwards, and a hope, divided against itself, that his actual way of life would last forever. He often felt heavy-hearted; he was sombre without knowing why; there were no visible clouds in his heaven, but there were cloud-shadows on his mood. Shadows projected, they often were, without his knowing it, by an undue apprehension that things after all might not go so ideally well with Roderick. When he understood his anxiety it vexed him, and he rebuked himself for taking things unmanfully hard. If Roderick chose to follow a crooked path, it was no fault of his; he had given him, he would continue to give him, all that he had offered him—friendship, sympathy, advice. He had not undertaken to provide him with unflagging strength of purpose, nor to stand bondsman for unqualified success.
If Rowland felt his roots striking and spreading in the Roman soil, Roderick also surrendered himself with renewed abandon to the local influence. More than once he declared to his companion that he meant to live and die within the shadow of Saint Peter’s, and that he cared little if he never again drew breath in American air. “For a man of my temperament, Rome is the only possible place,” he said; “it ‘s better to recognize the fact early than late. So I shall never go home unless I am absolutely forced.”
“What is your idea of ‘force’?” asked Rowland, smiling. “It seems to me you have an excellent reason for going home some day or other.”
“Ah, you mean my engagement?” Roderick answered with unaverted eyes. “Yes, I am distinctly engaged, in Northampton, and impatiently waited for!” And he gave a little sympathetic sigh. “To reconcile Northampton and Rome is rather a problem. Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I have no intention of giving up Rome within six or eight years, and an engagement of that duration would be rather absurd.”
“Miss Garland could hardly leave your mother,” Rowland observed.
“Oh, of course my mother should come. I think I will suggest it in my next letter. It will take her a year or two to make up her mind to it, but if she consents it will brighten her up. It ‘s too small a life, over there, even for a timid old lady. It is hard to imagine,” he added, “any change in Mary being a change for the better; but I should like her to take a look at the world and have her notions stretched a little. One is never so good, I suppose, but that one can improve a little.”
“If you wish your mother and Miss Garland to come,” Rowland suggested, “you had better go home and bring them.”
“Oh, I can’t think of leaving Europe, for many a day,” Roderick answered. “At present it would quite break the charm. I am just beginning to profit, to get used to things and take them naturally. I am sure the sight of Northampton Main Street would permanently upset me.”
It was reassuring to hear that Roderick, in his own view, was but “just beginning” to spread his wings, and Rowland, if he had had any forebodings, might have suffered them to be modified by this declaration. This was the first time since their meeting at Geneva that Roderick had mentioned Miss Garland’s name, but the ice being broken, he indulged for some time afterward in frequent allusions to his betrothed, which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied, consideration. An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age—possibly an affectionate maiden aunt—who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated: perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter, first and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all possible lights. There was something terribly hard to explain in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was particularly so in this one. Just why it was that Roderick should not logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion. That if he chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick’s mistress, the irregularity here was hardly Roderick’s, was a view of the case to which poor Rowland did scanty justice. There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one’s business to fall in love with a little—women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating. Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the divine tremor, of a lover. There were other women—they might have great beauty, they might have small; perhaps they were generally to be classified as plain—whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent. Such a one preeminently, was Mary Garland. Upon the doctrine of probabilities, it was unlikely that she had had an equal charm for each of them, and was it not possible, therefore, that the charm for Roderick had been simply the charm imagined, unquestioningly accepted: the general charm of youth, sympathy, kindness—of the present feminine, in short—enhanced indeed by several fine facial traits? The charm in this case for Rowland was—the charm!—the mysterious, individual, essential woman. There was an element in the charm, as his companion saw it, which Rowland was obliged to recognize, but which he forbore to ponder; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity. As to Miss Garland being in love with Roderick and becoming charming thereby, this was a point with which his imagination ventured to take no liberties; partly because it would have been indelicate, and partly because it would have been vain. He contented himself with feeling that the young girl was still as vivid an image in his memory as she had been five days after he left her, and with drifting nearer and nearer to the impression that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick’s sentimental needs as well. Any other girl indeed would do so still! Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva, in saying that he had been taking at Baden the measure of his susceptibility to female beauty.
His extraordinary success in modeling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of this amiable quality. She sat to him, repeatedly, for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished. On one of the last days Roderick asked Rowland to come and give his opinion as to what was still wanting; for the sittings had continued to take place in Mrs. Light’s apartment, the studio being pronounced too damp for the fair model. When Rowland presented himself, Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor’s approval. He stood beside her, directing the operation with a peremptoriness of tone which seemed to Rowland to denote a considerable advance in intimacy. As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience. “Do it yourself, then!” she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders.
They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom. Rowland’s eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it. If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she was not a superficial one.
“Hudson ‘s a sculptor,” said Rowland, with warmth. “But if I were only a painter!”
“Thank Heaven you are not!” said Christina. “I am having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms.”
“My dear young man, hands off!” cried Mrs. Light, coming forward and seizing her daughter’s hair. “Christina, love, I am surprised.”
“Is it indelicate?” Christina asked. “I beg Mr. Mallet’s pardon.” Mrs. Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her fingers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile. Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slave-merchant, calling attention to the “points” of a Circassian beauty, he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light’s. “Mamma ‘s not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother’s by-play. “She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.”
“You unnatural child!” cried mamma. “You deserve that I should make a fright of you!” And with half a dozen skillful passes she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head, as a kind of coronal.
“What does your mother do when she wants to do you justice?” Rowland asked, observing the admirable line of the young girl’s neck.
“I do her justice when I say she says very improper things. What is one to do with such a thorn in the flesh?” Mrs. Light demanded.
“Think of it at your leisure, Mr. Mallet,” said Christina, “and when you ‘ve discovered something, let us hear. But I must tell you that I shall not willingly believe in any remedy of yours, for you have something in your physiognomy that particularly provokes me to make the remarks that my mother so sincerely deplores. I noticed it the first time I saw you. I think it ‘s because your face is so broad. For some reason or other, broad faces exasperate me; they fill me with a kind of rabbia. Last summer, at Carlsbad, there was an Austrian count, with enormous estates and some great office at court. He was very attentive—seriously so; he was really very far gone. Cela ne tenait qu’ a moi! But I could n’t; he was impossible! He must have measured, from ear to ear, at least a yard and a half. And he was blond, too, which made it worse—as blond as Stenterello; pure fleece! So I said to him frankly, ‘Many thanks, Herr Graf; your uniform is magnificent, but your face is too fat.’”
“I am afraid that mine also,” said Rowland, with a smile, “seems just now to have assumed an unpardonable latitude.”
“Oh, I take it you know very well that we are looking for a husband, and that none but tremendous swells need apply. Surely, before these gentlemen, mamma, I may speak freely; they are disinterested. Mr. Mallet 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.”
