library was tolerable proof that you were not a fool. Corrupt things
they certainly were; in the line of sculpture they were quite the latest
fruit of time. It was the artist's opinion that there is no essential
difference between beauty and ugliness; that they overlap and
intermingle in a quite inextricable manner; that there is no saying
where one begins and the other ends; that hideousness grimaces at you
suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms
before your eyes in the lap of vileness; that it is a waste of wit to
nurse metaphysical distinctions, and a sadly meagre entertainment to
caress imaginary lines; that the thing to aim at is the expressive, and
the way to reach it is by ingenuity; that for this purpose everything
may serve, and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the
pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque. Its prime duty is
to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination.
Gloriani's statues were florid and meretricious; they looked like
magnified goldsmith's work. They were extremely elegant, but they had no
charm for Rowland. He never bought one, but Gloriani was such an
honest fellow, and withal was so deluged with orders, that this made
no difference in their friendship. The artist might have passed for a
Frenchman. He was a great talker, and a very picturesque one; he was
almost bald; he had a small, bright eye, a broken nose, and a moustache
with waxed ends. When sometimes he received you at his lodging, he
introduced you to a lady with a plain face whom he called Madame
Gloriani--which she was not.

Rowland's second guest was also an artist, but of a very different type.
His friends called him Sam Singleton; he was an American, and he had
been in Rome a couple of years. He painted small landscapes, chiefly in
water-colors: Rowland had seen one of them in a shop window, had liked
it extremely, and, ascertaining his address, had gone to see him and