color. Rowland grudged him none of his smiles, and took an extreme
satisfaction in his two statues. He had the Adam and the Eve transported
to his own apartment, and one warm evening in May he gave a little
dinner in honor of the artist. It was small, but Rowland had meant it
should be very agreeably composed. He thought over his friends and chose
four. They were all persons with whom he lived in a certain intimacy.

One of them was an American sculptor of French extraction, or remotely,
perhaps, of Italian, for he rejoiced in the somewhat fervid name of
Gloriani. He was a man of forty, he had been living for years in Paris
and in Rome, and he now drove a very pretty trade in sculpture of the
ornamental and fantastic sort. In his youth he had had money; but he
had spent it recklessly, much of it scandalously, and at twenty-six
had found himself obliged to make capital of his talent. This was quite
inimitable, and fifteen years of indefatigable exercise had brought
it to perfection. Rowland admitted its power, though it gave him very
little pleasure; what he relished in the man was the extraordinary
vivacity and frankness, not to call it the impudence, of his ideas. He
had a definite, practical scheme of art, and he knew at least what he
meant. In this sense he was solid and complete. There were so many of
the aesthetic fraternity who were floundering in unknown seas, without
a notion of which way their noses were turned, that Gloriani, conscious
and compact, unlimitedly intelligent and consummately clever, dogmatic
only as to his own duties, and at once gracefully deferential and
profoundly indifferent to those of others, had for Rowland a certain
intellectual refreshment quite independent of the character of his
works. These were considered by most people to belong to a very corrupt,
and by many to a positively indecent school. Others thought them
tremendously knowing, and paid enormous prices for them; and indeed, to
be able to point to one of Gloriani's figures in a shady corner of your