pean
society, in the last century, as a gentleman in a cocked hat and
brocaded waistcoat. Hudson asked Rowland questions which poor Rowland
was quite unable to answer, and of which he was equally unable to
conceive where he had picked up the data. Roderick ended by answering
them himself, tolerably to his satisfaction, and in a short time he
had almost turned the tables and become in their walks and talks the
accredited source of information. Rowland told him that when he turned
sculptor a capital novelist was spoiled, and that to match his eye for
social detail one would have to go to Honore de Balzac. In all this
Rowland took a generous pleasure; he felt an especial kindness for his
comrade's radiant youthfulness of temperament. He was so much younger
than he himself had ever been! And surely youth and genius, hand in
hand, were the most beautiful sight in the world. Roderick added to this
the charm of his more immediately personal qualities. The vivacity of
his perceptions, the audacity of his imagination, the picturesqueness
of his phrase when he was pleased,--and even more when he was
displeased,--his abounding good-humor, his candor, his unclouded
frankness, his unfailing impulse to share every emotion and impression
with his friend; all this made comradeship a pure felicity, and
interfused with a deeper amenity their long evening talks at cafe doors
in Italian towns.

They had gone almost immediately to Paris, and had spent their days at
the Louvre and their evenings at the theatre. Roderick was divided in
mind as to whether Titian or Mademoiselle Delaporte was the greater
artist. They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had spent
a fortnight in Venice and another in Florence, and had now been a month
in Rome. Roderick had said that he meant to spend three months in simply
looking, absorbing, and reflecting, without putting pencil to paper. He
looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things--things greater,
doubtless, at times, than the intentions of the artist. And yet he made
few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to
like and to dislike. He judged instinctively and passionately, but
never vulgarly. At Venice, for a couple of days, he had half a fit of
melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way, and
that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the coloring
of Titian and Paul Veronese. Then one morning the two young men had
themse