And then, bless you, she has seen such a lot! Her talk is full of the oddest allusions!""It is altogether a very singular type of young lady,"said Rowland, after the visit which I have related at length.
"It may be a charm, but it is certainly not the orthodox charm of marriageable maidenhood, the charm of shrinking innocence and soft docility.Our American girls are accused of being more knowing than any others, and Miss Light 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 a product of the old world, and certainly you were not far wrong.""Ah, she has an atmosphere," said Roderick, in the tone of high appreciation.
"Young unmarried women," Rowland answered, "should be careful not to have too much!""Ah, you don't forgive her," cried his companion, "for hitting you so hard!
A man ought to be flattered at such a girl as that taking so much notice of him.""A man is never flattered at a woman's not liking him.""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 in favor.""He would have also," said Rowland, laughing, "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 girl he was.
But it amounted almost to arrogance, you may say, in poor Rowland to pretend to know how often Roderick thought of Miss Garland.
He wondered gloomily, at any rate, whether for men of his companion's large, easy power, there was not a larger 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 rhapsodizing about Miss 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 picturesque brown locks? Or had he, in fact, no conscience to speak of?
Happy fellow, 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 nose.You 're a detestably lucky fellow, my boy!
But you ought not to have squandered such material on a ****** bust; you should have made a great imaginative figure.
If I could only have got hold of her, I would have put her into a statue in spite of herself.What a pity she is not a ragged Trasteverine, whom we might have for a franc an hour!
I have been carrying about in my head for years a delicious design for a fantastic figure, but it has always stayed there for want of a tolerable model.I have seen intimations of the type, but Miss Light is the perfection of it.
As soon as I saw her I said to myself, 'By Jove, there 's my statue in the flesh!' ""What is your subject?" asked Roderick.
"Don't take it ill," said Gloriani."You know I 'm the very deuce for observation.She would make a magnificent Herodias!"If Roderick had taken it ill (which was unlikely, for we know he thought Gloriani an ass, and expected little of his wisdom), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in a sort of mental prostration before both bust and artist.But Roderick's attitude before his patient little devotee was one of undisguised though friendly amusement;and, indeed, judged from a strictly plastic point of view, the poor fellow's diminutive stature, his enormous mouth, his pimples and his yellow hair were 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 shutWithin 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.