. It had lured him out into
mid-ocean and smoothed the sea and stilled the winds and given him a
singularly sympathetic comrade, and then it had turned and delivered him
a thumping blow in mid-chest. "Yes," he said, after an attempt at the
usual formal congratulation, "you certainly ought to do better--with
Miss Garland waiting for you at Northampton."

Roderick, now that he had broken ground, was eloquent and rung a hundred
changes on the assurance that he was a very happy man. Then at last,
suddenly, his climax was a yawn, and he declared that he must go to bed.
Rowland let him go alone, and sat there late, between sea and sky.

CHAPTER III. Rome

One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were
sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi.
They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where
the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that
dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse
from Olympus. Then they had wandered out into the gardens, and
were lounging away the morning under the spell of their magical
picturesqueness. Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else; that,
after the Juno, it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and
trees. There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had
seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects.
But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it could n't
be worth a fig, and that he did n't care to look at ugly things. He
remained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on the grass,
while Rowland went off envying the intellectual comfort of genius, which
can arrive at serene conclusions without disagreeable processes. When
the latter came back, his friend was sitting with his elbows on his
knees and his head in his hands. Rowland, in the geniality of a mood
attuned to the mellow charm of a Roman villa, found a good word to say
for the Guercino; but he chiefly talked of the view from the little
belvedere on the roof of the casino, and how it looked like the prospect
from a castle turret in a fairy tale.

"Very likely," said Roderick, throwing himself back with a yawn. "But I
must let it pass. I have seen enough for the present; I have reached the
top of the hill. I have an indigestion of impressions; I must work them
off before I go in for any more. I don't want to look at any more of
o