ere 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."

"Oh, I don't envy Hudson anything he possesses," Singleton said,
"because to take anything away would spoil his beautiful completeness.
'Complete,' that 's what he is; while we little clevernesses are like
half-ripened plums, only good eating on the side that has had a glimpse
of the sun. Nature has made him so, and fortune confesses to it! He is
the handsomest fellow in Rome, he has the most genius, and, as a matter
of course, the most beautiful girl in the world comes and offers to be
his model. If that is not completeness, where shall we find it?"

One morning, going into Roderick's studio, Rowland found the young
sculptor entertaining Miss Blanchard--if this is not too flattering a
description of his gracefully passive tolerance of her presence. He had
never liked her and never climbed into her sky-studio to observe her
wonderful manipulation of petals. He had once quoted Tennyson against
her:--

"And is there any moral shut
Within the bosom of the rose?"

"In all Miss Blanchard's roses you may be sure there is a moral," he had
said. "You can see it sticking out its head, and, if you go to smell the
flower, it scratches your nose." But on this occasion she had come
with a propitiatory gift--introducing her friend Mr. Leavenworth. Mr.
Leavenworth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully
brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-favored face, which seemed,
somehow, to have more room in it than was occupied by a smile of
superior benevolence, so that (with his smooth, white forehead) it bore
a certain resemblance to a large parlor with a very florid carpet, but
no pictures on the walls. He held his head high, talked sonorously, and
told Roderick, within five minutes, that he was a widower, traveling
to distract his mind, and that he had lately retired from the
proprietorship of large mines of borax in Pennsylvania. Roderick
supposed at first that, in his character of depressed widower, he had
come to order a tombstone; but observing then the extreme blandness
of his address to Miss Blanchard, he credited him with a judicious
prevision that by the