professions of penitence, but he practiced an unmitigated frankness,
and his self-reprobation might be taken for granted. He implied in every
phrase that he had done with it all, and that he was counting the hours
till he could get back to work. We shall not rehearse his confession in
detail; its main outline will be sufficient. He had fallen in with some
very idle people, and had discovered that a little example and a little
practice were capable of producing on his own part a considerable relish
for their diversions. What could he do? He never read, and he had no
studio; in one way or another he had to pass the time. He passed it in
dangling about several very pretty women in wonderful Paris toilets,
and reflected that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit
under a tree, looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying
things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and
show its teeth. Attached to these ladies were certain gentlemen who
walked about in clouds of perfume, rose at midday, and supped at
midnight. Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them very
amusing fellows. He was surprised at his own taste, but he let it take
its course. It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies who
expect you to present them with expensive bouquets, to ride with them in
the Black Forest on well-looking horses, to come into their opera-boxes
on nights when Patti sang and prices were consequent, to propose little
light suppers at the Conversation House after the opera or drives by
moonlight to the Castle, to be always arrayed and anointed, trinketed
and gloved,--that to move in such society, we say, though it might be a
privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached. But the tables made
such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables. Roderick
tried them and found that at first they smoothed his path delightfully.
This simplification of matters, however, was only momentary, for he soon
perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed
a good-looking young man to peculiar liabilities. At this point of his
friend's narrative, Rowland was reminded of Madame de Cruchecassee in
The Newcomes, and though he had listened in tranquil silence to the rest
of it, he found it hard not to say that all this had been, under
the circumstances, a very bad business. Roderick admitted it with
bitterness, and then told how much--measured simply financially--it ha