for society
at Frascati, as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed
between them. Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a
liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be
displeased with him. It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he
complied with his friend's summons without a moment's hesitation. His
cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was the dupe of his intense
benevolence. She put the case with too little favor, or too much, as the
reader chooses; it is certain, at least, that he had a constitutional
tendency towards magnanimous interpretations. Nothing happened, however,
to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick's
secondary impulses were wiser than his primary ones, and that the
rounded total of his nature had a harmony perfectly attuned to the most
amiable of its brilliant parts. Roderick's humor, for the time, was
pitched in a minor key; he was lazy, listless, and melancholy, but he
had never been more friendly and kindly and appealingly submissive.
Winter had begun, by the calendar, but the weather was divinely mild,
and the two young men took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged
away the mornings in the villas. The villas at Frascati are delicious
places, and replete with romantic suggestiveness. Roderick, as he
had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his
meditations, Rowland was perfectly willing to bear him company and coax
along the process. But Roderick let him know from the first that he was
in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could
think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr.
Leavenworth.

"It is worse out here than in Rome," he said, "for here I am face to
face with the dead blank of my mind! There I could n't think of anything
either, but there I found things to make me forget that I needed to."
This was as frank an allusion to Christina Light as could have been
expected under the circumstances; it seemed, indeed, to Rowland
surprisingly frank, and a pregnant example of his companion's often
strangely irresponsible way of looking at harmful facts. Roderick
was silent sometimes for hours, with a puzzled look on his face and
a constant fold between his even eyebrows; at other times he talked
unceasingly, with a slow, idle, half-nonsensical drawl. Rowland was half
a dozen times on the point of asking him what was the matter with him;
he