Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 9
IX
The brilliant Roman winter came round again, and the whole sense of it entered still more deeply into Rowland's spirit. He grew intimately, passionately fond of all Roman sights and sensations, and to breathe the air that formed their medium and assured them their quality seemed to him the only condition on which life could be long worth living. He could not have defined nor explained the nature of his relish, nor have made up the sum of it by adding together his calculable pleasures. It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps the most pertinent thing that might be said was that it brought with it a relaxed acceptance of the present, the actual, the sensuous—of existence on the terms of the moment. It was perhaps for this very reason that, in spite of the charm which Rome flings over one's mood, there ran through Rowland's meditations an undertone of melancholy natural enough in a mind which finds its horizon sensibly limited—even by a magic circle. Whether it be that one tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for the precious gift one must do without it altogether; or whether in an atmosphere so heavily weighted with echoes and memories one grows to believe that there is nothing in one's consciousness not predetermined to moulder and crumble and become dust for the feet and possible malaria for the lungs of future generations—the fact at least remains that one parts half willingly with one's hopes in Rome and misses them only under some very exceptional stress of circumstance. For this reason it may perhaps be said that there is no other place in which one's daily temper has so mellow a serenity, and none at the same time in which acute attacks of depression are more intolerable. Rowland had found in fact a perfect response to his prevision that to live in the lap of the incomparable sorceress was an education to the senses and the imagination; but he sometimes wondered whether this were not a questionable gain in case of one's not being prepared to ask no more of consciousness than they could give. His growing submission to the mere insidious actual, which resembled somehow the presence of an extravagant, flattering visitor, questionably sincere, seemed sometimes to pivot about by a mysterious inward impulse and look his conscience in the face. "But afterwards...?" it brought out with a long interrogative echo; and he could give no answer but a shy affirmation that there was no such thing as to-morrow and that to-day was uncommonly fine. He often felt heavy-hearted; he was sombre without knowing why; there were no visible clouds in his heaven, but there were cloud-shadows on his mood. Shadows projected they often were, without his knowing it, by an undue apprehension that things might after all not go so ideally well with Roderick. When he caught himself fidgeting it vexed him, and he rebuked himself for taking the case unduly hard. If Roderick chose to follow a crooked path, it was no fault of his; he had given him, he would continue to give him, all that he had offered him—friendship, sympathy, counsel, patience. He had not undertaken to make him over.
If Rowland felt his roots striking and spreading in the Roman soil, Roderick also affected him as having flung all questions to the winds. More than once he heard him declare that he meant to live and die within the shadow of Saint Peter's and that he cared little if he should never again draw breath in American air. "For a man of my temperament Rome is the only possible place," he said; "it's better to recognise the fact early than late. So I shall never go home unless I 'm absolutely forced."
"What's your idea of 'force'?" asked Rowland, who had noticed from far back the unalloyed respect that he entertained for his temperament. "It seems to me you 've an excellent reason for going home some day or other."
"Ah, you mean my engagement?" Roderick answered with unaverted eyes. "Oh yes, of course there 's always that funny fact to be reckoned with. I call it funny, poor dear little fact," he went on, "because it savours so of Northampton Mass, and be cause Northampton Mass seen from here somehow is so funny. To work Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom into the same picture—the same picture of one's life as the Pincian and the Palatine—is rather a job. But Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I 've no intention of giving up Rome for six or eight years, and a union deferred for that length of time would be too absurd."
"Miss Garland could hardly leave your mother alone," Rowland judiciously observed.
"Oh, of course my mother should come! I think I must suggest it in my next letter. It will take her a year or two to make up her mind to it, but if she consents it will brighten her up. It 's too small and too starved a life over there even for a person who asks—asks, what do I say? insists on—so little here below as my mother. It 's hard to imagine," Roderick added, "any change in Mary being a change for the better; but I suppose there's no crime in seeing the profit of a change for her. She would undertake, I dare say, not to be altered by it, in any essential way, enough to make a scandal. One 's never so good, I suppose, but that one can improve."
Rowland took in for a moment the tone of this, and he felt fifty words in answer to it rise to his lips. But he ended by pronouncing only a few and none of them those that had at first risen. "If you wish your mother and Miss Garland to come, hadn't you better go home and bring them?"
"Ah, my dear man, I like the way you talk of my going 'home'! The more I should 'go' the less of that sacred name there would be about it—so that not really to become homeless I had better keep my distance. At present, moreover," Roderick pursued, "it would just exactly break the charm. I'm just beginning to profit, to get accustomed to—well, to not being accustomed; just beginning, that is, to live into my possibilities. Northampton Main Street—even for three days again—has become, I think, my principal impossibility."
It was reassuring to hear that Roderick in his own view was but "just beginning" to spread his wings, and Rowland, if he had had any forebodings, might have suffered them to be modified by this declaration. This was the first time since their meeting at Geneva that the youth had mentioned his cousin's name, but the ice being broken he indulged for some time afterwards in frequent allusions to his betrothed, which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied, consideration. An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age—possibly an affectionate maiden aunt—who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated; perhaps presented him with a cheque for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it were not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter first and last in a great many different ways—he had looked at it in all possible lights. There was something that mocked any sense of due sequences in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the "type" that, other things being what they were, would most have touched him, and the mystery of attraction and desire, always so baffling if seen only from without, quite defied analysis here. Just why it was that Roderick should not in consistency have received his impression his comrade would have been at a loss to say; but the conviction must have been largely grounded in a tacit comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to mark with the seal of prospective possession a woman at whose disposition he himself had been keeping, from the moment of his first meeting her, a secret fund of strange alacrities. That if Rowland Mallet happened to be very much struck with the merits of Roderick's mistress the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case to which our virtuous hero did scanty justice. There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a little—women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily interesting. Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the terror or the hunger, of a lover. There were other women—they might have great beauty, they might have small; their discussable beauty was not what had most to do with it—whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent. Such a one conspicuously was Mary Garland. By the law of probabilities it had been unlikely she should exert the same charm for each of them, and was it not possible therefore that the charm for Roderick had been simply the circumstance of sex, the accident of nearness, the influence of youth, sympathy, kindness—of the present feminine in short—enhanced indeed by the advantage of an expressive countenance? The charm for Rowland, on the other hand, by this subtle sophistry—the charm! was the mysterious, individual, essential woman. There was indeed an element in the glamour working so well for his friend that he was obliged fairly to allow for, but which he forbore to linger upon; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity. As to the girl's being herself in love, and showing it, and commending herself by the indubitable tribute, this was a side of the matter from which he averted his head for delicacy, as he conceived, but for a delicacy not pleasantly painless. He would n't for the world have asked himself—and he quite noted it—how "far" Mary had gone; gone toward creating Roderick's flattered state by showing him first that she was smitten. He confined himself only to judging that the young man was not irresistibly flattered now, and to feeling that Miss Garland was as living a presence in his own world as she had been five days after he left her. He drifted, under these deep discretions indeed, nearer and nearer to the conviction that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick's supposedly sentimental needs as well. Any other woman verily would do so still! Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva in saying that he had been taking at Baden-Baden the measure of his susceptibility.
His extraordinary success in modelling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of the quantity of consciousness of the great feminine fact always at his service for application and discrimination. She sat to him repeatedly for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished. On one of the last days Roderick asked Rowland to come and give his opinion as to what was still wanting; for the sittings had continued to take place in Mrs. Light's apartment, the studio being pronounced too damp for the fair model. When Rowland presented himself Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror to readjust her hair, the arrangement of which on this occasion had apparently not met the young sculptor's approval. He stood beside her directing the operation with an emphatic ring that struck Rowland as denoting a considerable advance in intimacy. As this visitor entered Christina was losing patience. "Do it yourself then!" she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders.
They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom. Rowland's eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own showed no vulgar perception of anything she was so little concerned with. If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, her coquetry had the highest finish.
"Hudson has the luck to be a sculptor, in his way," Rowland remarked with gaiety; "but it comes over me that if I were only a painter—!"
"Thank goodness you're not!" said Christina. "I 'm having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms."
"My dear young man, hands off!" cried Mrs. Light as she came forward and seized her daughter's hair. "Christina love, I'm more surprised than I can say."
"Is it indelicate?" Christina asked. "I beg Mr. Mallet's pardon." Mrs. Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her ringers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile. Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slave-merchant calling attention to the "points" of a Circassian beauty he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light's. "Mamma's not really shocked," added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother's byplay. "She's only afraid that Mr. Hudson may have injured my hair and that, per conseguenza, I shall fetch a lower price."
"You unnatural child!" cried mamma. "You deserve that I should make a fright of you!" And with half a dozen skilful passes she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head and producing the effect of a coronet.
"What does your mother do when she wants to do you justice?" Rowland enquired, observing the admirable line of the girl's neck and shoulder.
"I do her justice when I say she says very atrocious things. What's one to do with such a horrible handful?" Mrs. Light demanded.
"Think of it at your leisure, Mr. Mallet," said Christina, "and when you 've discovered some thing let us hear. But I must tell you that I shall not willingly believe in any remedy of yours, for you have something in the expression of your face that particularly provokes me to make the remarks my mother so inconsolably deplores. I noticed it the first time I saw you. I think it 's because your face is so broad. For some reason or other broad faces exasperate me; they fill me with a kind of rabbia. Last summer at Carlsbad there was an Austrian count with enormous estates and some great office at court. He was very attentive — seriously so; he was really very far gone. Cela ne tenait qu'à moi! But I could n't; he was impossible. He must have measured from ear to ear at least a yard and a half. And he was tow-coloured too, which made it worse — almost as fair as Stenterello — though of course Stenterello's face, like his conversation, is full of point. So I said to him frankly: 'Many thanks, Herr Graf; your uniform's magnificent, but your face is too fat.'"
"I 'm afraid that mine also," said Rowland with a smile, "seems just now to have assumed an unpardonable latitude."
"Oh, I take it you know very well that we're hunting for a husband and that none but tremendous swells need apply. Surely before these gentlemen, mamma, I may speak freely; they 're so perfectly disinterested. Mr. Mallet won't do, because, though he 's rich, he 's not rich enough. Mamma made that discovery the day after we went to see you, moved to it by the promising look of your furniture. I hope she was right, eh? Unless you have millions, you know, you need n't apply."
"You reduce me to the sense of beggary," said Rowland.
"Oh, some better girl than I will decide some day, after mature reflection, that, on the whole, you yourself add something to your fortune. Mr. Hudson of course is nowhere; he has nothing but his genius and his extraordinary beaux yeux."
Roderick had stood looking at Christina intently while she delivered herself, softly and slowly, of this surprising nonsense. When she had finished she turned and confronted him; their eyes met and he blushed a little. "Let me be your modeller, and he who can may be your husband!" he said abruptly.
Mrs. Light, while her daughter talked, had been adding a few touches to the arrangement of her hair.
"She 's neither so silly nor so vicious as you might suppose," she said to Rowland with dignity. "If you 'll give me your arm we 'll go and look at the bust."
"Does that most represent silliness or vice — unless they come to the same thing?" Christina demanded when they stood before it. Rowland transferred his glance several times from the portrait to the original. "It represents a young lady whom I should n't pretend to judge off-hand."
"She may be a fool, but you 're not sure. Many thanks! You 've seen me half a dozen times. You 're either very slow or I 'm very deep."
"I'm certainly slow," said Rowland. "I don't expect to make up my mind about you in less than six months."
"I give you six months if you 'll promise then a perfectly frank opinion. Mind, I shall not forget; I shall insist upon a judgement."
"Well, though I'm slow I'm tolerably judging," said Rowland—"and I 'm tolerably brave. So look out!"
Christina considered the bust with a sigh. "I'm afraid, after all," she said, "that there's very little wisdom in it save what the artist has put there. Mr. Hudson looked particularly wise while he was working; he scowled and growled, but he never opened his mouth. It 's very kind of him not to have represented me yawning."
"If I had felt obliged to talk a lot of rubbish to you," Roderick candidly said, "the thing would n't have been a tenth so good, and I should have been a great deal more fatigued."
"Is it good, after all? Mr. Mallet's a famous connoisseur; hasn't he come here to pronounce?" the girl went on.
The bust was in fact a very happy performance—Roderick had risen to the level of his subject. It was thoroughly a portrait,—not a vague fantasy executed on a graceful theme, as the busts of pretty women in modern sculpture are apt to be. The resemblance was close and firm; inch matched with inch, item with item, grain with grain, yet all to fresh creation. It succeeded by an exquisite art in representing without extravagance something that transcended and exceeded. Rowland, however, as we know, was not fond of exploding into superlatives, and after examining the piece he contented himself with suggesting two or three alterations of detail.
"Ah, how can you be so cruel?" demanded Mrs. Light with rich reproachfulness. "It 's surely a wonderful thing!"
"Rowland knows it 's a wonderful thing," said Roderick smiling. "I can tell that by his face. The other day I finished something he thought really bad, and he looked very differently from this."
"How can Mr. Mallet look?" asked Christina.
"My dear Rowland," said Roderick, "I 'm speaking of my poor listening lady. You looked as if you had on a pair of tight boots."
"Ah my child, you 'll not understand that!" cried Mrs. Light. "You never yet had a pair that were small enough."
"It's a pity, Mr. Hudson," said Christina gravely, "that you could n't have introduced my feet into the bust. But we can hang a pair of satin shoes round the neck."
"I nevertheless like your finished portraits, Roderick," Rowland observed, "better than your rough sketches. This is a great commemoration of a great subject. Miss Light, you may really be proud!"
"Thank you, Mr. Mallet, for the permission," returned the girl.
"I'm dying to see it in the marble—I make it out in a kind of violet velvet niche," said Mrs. Light.
"Placed there on the mosaic table and under the Sassoferrato!" Christina went on. "We have a Sassoferrato, you know, from which we 're inseparable — we travel with our picture and our poodle. I hope you keep well in mind, Mr. Hudson, at all events, that you 've not a grain of property in your work and that if mamma chooses she may have it photographed and the copies sold in the Piazza di Spagna at five francs apiece without your having a sou of the profits."
"Amen!" said Roderick. "It was so nominated in the bond. My profits are here!" And he tapped his forehead.
"It would be prettier if you said here!" And Christina touched her heart.
"My precious child, how you do run on!" murmured Mrs. Light.
"It 's Mr. Mallet's effect on me," the girl answered. "I can't talk a word of sense so long as he 's in the room. I don't say that to make you go," she added; "I say it simply to justify myself."
"The noble art of self-defence!" said Rowland.
Roderick declared that he must get at work and requested Christina to take her usual position, and Mrs. Light proposed to her visitor that they should adjourn to her boudoir. This was a small room, hardly more spacious than a recess, opening out of the drawing-room and having no other issue. Here, as they entered, on a divan near the door, Rowland perceived the constant Cavaliere, with his arms folded, his head dropped upon his breast and his eyes closed.
"Sleeping at his post!" laughed Rowland.
"That's a punishable offence," rejoined Mrs. Light sharply. She was on the point of calling him in the same tone when he suddenly opened his eyes, stared a moment and then rose with a smile and a bow.
"Excuse me, dear lady," he said, "I was overcome by the—the great heat."
"Nonsense, Cavaliere!" cried the lady; "you know we're perishing here with the cold! You had better go and cool yourself in one of the other rooms."
"I obey, dear lady," said the Cavaliere; and with another salutation to Rowland he departed, walking very discreetly on his toes. Rowland outstayed him but a short time, his appetite for Mrs. Light's conversation being small; he found nothing very inspiring in her frank intimation that if he chose he might become a favourite. He was disgusted with himself for pleasing her; he repudiated any such intention. In the courtyard of the palace he overtook the Cavaliere, who had stopped at the porter's lodge to say a word to this functionary's little girl. She was a young lady of very tender years and she wore a very dirty pinafore. He had taken her up in his arms to sing her an infantine rhyme, while she stared at him with big deep Roman eyes. On seeing Rowland he put her down with a kiss, then stepped forward with a conscious grin, an unresentful admission that he was sensitive both to infant beauty and to ridicule. Rowland began to pity him again; he had taken his dismissal from the drawing-room so meekly.
"You don't keep your promise to come and see me. But please don't forget it. I want you to tell me about Rome thirty years ago."
"Thirty years ago? Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where strange things happen! But happy things too, since I have your renewed permission to call. You do me too much honour. Is it in the morning or in the evening that I should least intrude?"
"Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come some time. I depend upon you," said Rowland.
The Cavaliere thanked him with formal obeisance. To old Giacosa too he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic; but the idea of pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.
Miss Light's bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick's studio, and half the foreign colony came to see it. With the completion of his work, however, Roderick's visits at the Palazzo Falconieri by no means came to an end. He spent half his time in Mrs. Light's drawing-room and began to be talked about as "attentive" to Christina. The success of the bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humour he suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in his thoughts. Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener than speaker; partly because Roderick's tone admitted of few openings, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for having called her unsafe, he for some reason lacked presence of mind to defend himself. The impression remained with our friend that she was unsafe; that she was a complex, wilful, passionate creature who might easily draw down a too confiding spirit into some strange underworld of unworthy sacrifice, not unfurnished with traces of others of the lost. And yet these elements in her were in themselves an appeal to curiosity, and she struck him not only as preying possibly thus on the faith of victims, but as ready to take on occasion her own life in her hand. Roderick, in the glow of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal, was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her beauty.
"I had no idea of it," he said, "till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modelling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair's-breadth that 's not admirably finished. And then her divine mouth—it might really be that of a goddess! It 's as if a pair of lips had been shaped just not to utter all the platitudes and all the pretences." Later, after he had been working for a week, he was to declare that if the girl had been inordinately plain she would still be the most wonderful of women and the best conceivable company. "I 've quite forgotten her beauty," he said, "or rather I've ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her. She 's all one, and all impossibly interesting."
"What does she do—what does she say that 's so remarkable?" Rowland asked.
"Say? Sometimes nothing—sometimes every thing. She's never the same, and you never know how she 'll be. And it's not for a pose—it's because there are fifty of her. Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore. She hardly looks at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work. On other days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions and pours out the most irresistible nonsense—is really most extraordinarily droll. She's a creature of moods; you can't count upon her; she keeps one's expectation, she keeps one's nerves, on the stretch: she's as far from banal as it's possible to be. And then, bless you, my dear man, she has seen, compared with you and me, for instance, so remarkably much of the world. She says the most astounding things."
"What sort of things?" Rowland wonderingly asked.
It made his friend hesitate. "I can scarcely think of a specimen that would n't too much shock you!"
"It 's altogether a singular type of young lady," said Rowland after the scene I have sketched. "It may be a charm, but it 's certainly not the orthodox charm of marriageable maidenhood, the charm of the 'nice girl' or the 'dear girl' as we have been accustomed to know those blest creatures. Our American girls are accused of being more forward than any others, and this wonderful damsel is nominally an American. But it has taken twenty years of Europe to make her what she is. The first time we saw her I remember you called her the product of an effete civilisation, and certainly you were not far wrong."
"Well, you see, she has an atmosphere," said Roderick in a tone of high appreciation.
"Young unmarried women should be careful not to have too much," his companion sagely risked.
"Ah, you don't forgive her for hitting you so hard! A man ought to be flattered when such a girl as that takes so much notice of him."
"A man 's never flattered at a beautiful woman's not liking him," said Rowland.
"Are you sure she does n't like you? That's to the credit of your humility. A fellow of more vanity might, on the evidence, persuade himself that he was positively in favour."
"He would have also then," laughed Rowland, "to be a fellow of remarkable ingenuity." He asked himself privately how the deuce Roderick reconciled it to his conscience to think so much more of the girl he was not engaged to than of the other. But it amounted almost to arrogance in poor Rowland, you may say, to pretend to know how often Roderick thought of Mary Garland. He wondered gloomily, at any rate, whether for men of his friend's large easy power there was not an ampler moral law than for narrow mediocrities like himself, who, yielding Nature a meagre interest on her investment (such as it was), had no reason to expect from her this affectionate laxity as to their accounts. Was it not a part of the eternal fitness of things that Roderick, while rhapsodising about Christina Light, should have it at his command to look at you with eyes of the most guileless and unclouded blue and to shake off your musty imputations by a toss of his romantic brown locks? Or else had he, in fact, no conscience to speak of? Fortunate mortal either way!
Our friend Gloriani came, among others, to congratulate Roderick on his model and what he had made of her. "Devilish pretty through and through!" he said as he looked at the bust. "Capital handling of the neck and throat; lovely work on the facial muscles and extraordinary play, extraordinary elegance of life, everywhere. Your luck 's too hateful, but you ought n't to have let her off with the mere sacrifice of her head. There would be no end to be done with the whole inimitable presence of her. If I could only have got hold of her I would have pumped every inch of her empty. What a pity she's not a poor Trasteverina whom we might have for a franc an hour! I've been carrying about in my head for years an idea for a creature as fine as a flower-stem and yet as full as a flame, but it has always stayed there for want of a tolerable model. I 've seen my notion in bits, but in her I see it whole. As soon as I looked at her I said to myself, 'By Jove, there 's my idea in the flesh!'"
"What 's the name of your idea?" Roderick asked.
"Don't take it ill," said Gloriani. "You know I'm the very deuce for observation. The name of my idea is the name of the young woman—what was hers?—who pranced up to the king her father with a great bloody head on a great gold tray."
"Salome, daughter of Herodias?"
"Exactly, and of Herod, king of the Jews."
"Do you think Miss Light looks then like a Jewess?"
"No, he only thinks," Rowland interposed, "that Herodias must much have resembled Miss Light — unless indeed he also sees our young woman with your head on her charger."
"Ah," Gloriani laughed, "it is n't a question of Hudson's 'head'!"
If Roderick had taken it ill, this likening of the girl he so admired to the macabre maiden of the Christian story (which resentment was not probable, since we know he thought Gloriani an ass and expected little truth of him), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in the very prostration of homage before both bust and artist. But Roderick's attitude in regard to this worshipper was one of undisguised though friendly amusement; as indeed there was oddity enough in the little water-colourist's gasps and glares and other fond intensities, which had ever some lapse of intelligibility for their climax. "Ah, don't envy our friend," Rowland said to Singleton afterwards, on his expressing with a small 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 's himself in person such a subject for a painter—a Pinturicchio-figure, is n't he? come to life; he has more genius than any one, and as a matter of course the most beautiful girl in the world comes and offers to feed him with her beauty. If that's not completeness where shall one look for it?"