But I keep thinking of those two praying, trusting neighbors of yours, and I feel wretchedly like a swindler.If his working mood came but once in five years I would willingly wait for it and maintain him in leisure, if need be, in the intervals;but that would be a sorry account to present to them.
Five years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the question.I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan! He 's too confoundedly all of one piece;he won't throw overboard a grain of the cargo to save the rest.
Fancy him thus with all his brilliant personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a nervous nineteenth-century Apollo, and you will understand that there is mighty little comfort in seeing him in a bad way.
He was tolerably foolish last summer at Baden Baden, but he got on his feet, and for a while he was steady.
Then he began to waver again, and at last toppled over.
Now, literally, he 's lying prone.He came into my room last night, miserably tipsy.I assure you, it did n't amuse me.....About Miss Light it 's a long story.She is one of the great beauties of all time, and worth coming barefoot to Rome, like the pilgrims of old, to see.Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman.And you may take this for truth, because I 'm not in love with her.On the contrary! Her education has been simply infernal.
She is corrupt, perverse, as proud as the queen of Sheba, and an appalling coquette; but she is generous, and with patience and skill you may enlist her imagination in a good cause as well as in a bad one.
The other day I tried to manipulate it a little.Chance offered me an interview to which it was possible to give a serious turn, and I boldly broke ground and begged her to suffer my poor friend to go in peace.
After a good deal of finessing she consented, and the next day, with a single word, packed him off to Naples to drown his sorrow in debauchery.
I have come to the conclusion that she is more dangerous in her virtuous moods than in her vicious ones, and that she probably has a way of turning her back which is the most provoking thing in the world.
She 's an actress, she could n't forego doing the thing dramatically, and it was the dramatic touch that made it fatal.I wished her, of course, to let him down easily; but she desired to have the curtain drop on an attitude, and her attitudes deprive inflammable young artists of their reason.....Roderick made an admirable bust of her at the beginning of the winter, and a dozen women came rushing to him to be done, mutatis mutandis, in the same style.
They were all great ladies and ready to take him by the hand, but he told them all their faces did n't interest him, and sent them away vowing his destruction."At this point of his long effusion, Rowland had paused and put by his letter.He kept it three days and then read it over.
He was disposed at first to destroy it, but he decided finally to keep it, in the hope that it might strike a spark of useful suggestion from the flint of Cecilia's good sense.
We know he had a talent for taking advice.And then it might be, he reflected, that his cousin's answer would throw some light on Mary Garland's present vision of things.
In his altered mood he added these few lines:--"I unburdened myself the other day of this monstrous load of perplexity; I think it did me good, and I let it stand.
I was in a melancholy muddle, and I was trying to work myself free.
You know I like discussion, in a quiet way, and there is no one with whom I can have it as quietly as with you, most sagacious of cousins! There is an excellent old lady with whom I often chat, and who talks very much to the point.
But Madame Grandoni has disliked Roderick from the first, and if I were to take her advice I would wash my hands of him.
You will laugh at me for my long face, but you would do that in any circumstances.I am half ashamed of my letter, for I have a faith in my friend that is deeper than my doubts.
He was here last evening, talking about the Naples Museum, the Aristides, the bronzes, the Pompeian frescoes, with such a beautiful intelligence that doubt of the ultimate future seemed blasphemy.I walked back to his lodging with him, and he was as mild as midsummer moonlight.
He has the ineffable something that charms and convinces;my last word about him shall not be a harsh one."Shortly after sending his letter, going one day into his friend's studio, he found Roderick suffering from the grave infliction of a visit from Mr.Leavenworth.
Roderick submitted with extreme ill grace to being bored, and he was now evidently in a state of high exasperation.
He had lately begun a representation of a lazzarone lounging in the sun; an image of serene, irresponsible, sensuous life.
The real lazzarone, he had admitted, was a vile fellow;but the ideal lazzarone--and his own had been subtly idealized--was a precursor of the millennium.
Mr.Leavenworth had apparently just transferred his unhurrying gaze to the figure.
"Something in the style of the Dying Gladiator?" he sympathetically observed.
"Oh no," said Roderick seriously, "he 's not dying, he 's only drunk!""Ah, but intoxication, you know," Mr.Leavenworth rejoined, "is not a proper subject for sculpture.Sculpture should not deal with transitory attitudes.""Lying dead drunk is not a transitory attitude! Nothing is more permanent, more sculpturesque, more monumental!""An entertaining paradox," said Mr.Leavenworth, "if we had time to exercise our wits upon it.I remember at Florence an intoxicated figure by Michael Angelo which seemed to me a deplorable aberration of a great mind.I myself touch liquor in no shape whatever.
I have traveled through Europe on cold water.The most varied and attractive lists of wines are offered me, but I brush them aside.