and often made his way, in quest of a prize, into the heart of
impecunious Roman households, which had been prevailed upon to
listen--with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile--to proposals
for an hereditary "antique." In the evening, often, under the lamp,
amid dropped curtains and the scattered gleam of firelight upon polished
carvings and mellow paintings, the two friends sat with their heads
together, criticising intaglios and etchings, water-color drawings and
illuminated missals. Roderick's quick appreciation of every form of
artistic beauty reminded his companion of the flexible temperament of
those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently
painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engravers. At times when he saw
how the young sculptor's day passed in a single sustained pulsation,
while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of
the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half suppressed, some of them,
for conscience' sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in
possession--he felt a pang of something akin to envy. But Rowland had
two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment: he
was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rider. He plunged into bulky
German octavos on Italian history, and he spent long afternoons in
the saddle, ranging over the grassy desolation of the Campagna. As the
season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves, he
found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy opportunity
for knowing others. He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside
an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself
society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted
invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that
the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such
observances is to take them with exaggerated gravity. He introduced
Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself--an
enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient