“If anything happens to you, I am accountable.  You must understand that.”

“That ’s a view of the situation I can’t accept; in your own interest, no less than in mine.  It can only make us both very uncomfortable.  I know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that!  But I am not a small boy nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes open.  When I do well, the merit ’s mine; if I do ill, the fault ’s mine!  The idea that I make you nervous is detestable.  Dedicate your nerves to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves.”

Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly his brilliant young friend was without a conscience; now it dimly occurred to him that he was without a heart.  Rowland, as we have already intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had gone forth into his relations with Roderick.  There had been, from the first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it.  Rowland, indeed, had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion’s deep, inexpressive assent to his interest in him.  “Here is an uncommonly fine thing,” he said to himself:  “a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of—­knocks the bottom out of pride!” His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in his companion’s whole personality that overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an instant faltered.  He listened to Roderick’s last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled—­with bitterness.

“I don’t at all like your telling me I am too zealous,” he said.  “If I had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you.”

Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle into the clay.  “Say it outright!  You have been a great fool to believe in me.”

“I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don’t honestly believe I do!” said Rowland.  “It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense.”

Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.  Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion’s strangely commingled character—­his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance.  It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this was but the painful complexity of genius.