ne of these? Who shall
assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum? Nothing proves it,
and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of
shaking off the dust of Northampton. If you believed so, my dear fellow,
you did so at your own risk! What am I, what are the best of us, but
an experiment? Do I succeed--do I fail? It does n't depend on me. I 'm
prepared for failure. It won't be a disappointment, simply because I
shan't survive it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When
I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game. I 'm not
making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won't add
insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble. But I have a
conviction that if the hour strikes here," and he tapped his forehead,
"I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud! For the past
ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming
before my eyes. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my
imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!"

Rowland listened to this outbreak, as he often had occasion to listen to
Roderick's heated monologues, with a number of mental restrictions. Both
in gravity and in gayety he said more than he meant, and you did him
simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of
purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a character as his
florid diction implied. The moods of an artist, his exaltations
and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the
pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set
his copy. He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but
he writes a magnificent hand. It was nevertheless true that at present
poor Roderick gave unprecedented tokens of moral stagnation, and as for
genius being held by the precarious tenure he had sketched, Rowland was
at a loss to see whence he could borrow the authority to contradict him.
He sighed to himself, and wished that his companion had a trifle more
of little Sam Singleton's evenness of impulse. But then, was Singleton
a man of genius? He answered that such reflections seemed to him
unprofitable, not to say morbid; that the proof of the pudding was
in the eating; that he did n't know about bringing a genius that had
palpably spent its last breath back to life again, but that he was
satisfied that vigorous effort was a cure for a great many ills