upon
him with an equanimity which Rowland found it hard to emulate. But in
this situation Roderick talked so much amusing nonsense that, for the
sake of his company, Rowland consented to be uncomfortable, and often
forgot that, though in these diversions the days passed quickly, they
brought forth neither high art nor low. And yet it was perhaps by their
help, after all, that Roderick secured several mornings of ardent work
on his new figure, and brought it to rapid completion. One afternoon,
when it was finished, Rowland went to look at it, and Roderick asked him
for his opinion.

"What do you think yourself?" Rowland demanded, not from pusillanimity,
but from real uncertainty.

"I think it is curiously bad," Roderick answered. "It was bad from the
first; it has fundamental vices. I have shuffled them in a measure out
of sight, but I have not corrected them. I can't--I can't--I can't!" he
cried passionately. "They stare me in the face--they are all I see!"

Rowland offered several criticisms of detail, and suggested certain
practicable changes. But Roderick differed with him on each of these
points; the thing had faults enough, but they were not those faults.
Rowland, unruffled, concluded by saying that whatever its faults might
be, he had an idea people in general would like it.

"I wish to heaven some person in particular would buy it, and take it
off my hands and out of my sight!" Roderick cried. "What am I to do
now?" he went on. "I have n't an idea. I think of subjects, but they
remain mere lifeless names. They are mere words--they are not images.
What am I to do?"

Rowland was a trifle annoyed. "Be a man," he was on the point of saying,
"and don't, for heaven's sake, talk in that confoundedly querulous
voice." But before he had uttered the words, there rang through the
studio a loud, peremptory ring at the outer door.

Roderick broke into a laugh. "Talk of the devil," he said, "and you see
his horns! If that 's not a customer, it ought to be."

The door of the studio was promptly flung open, and a lady advanced to
the threshold--an imposing, voluminous person, who quite filled up the
doorway. Rowland immediately felt that he had seen her before, but he
recognized her only when she moved forward and disclosed an attendant in
the person of a little bright-eyed, elderly gentleman, with a bristling
white moustache. Then he remembered that just a year before he and his
companion had seen in the Ludovisi garden