Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius.  Suddenly he felt an irresistible compassion for his companion; it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor.  Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius, accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless.  It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick’s standing helpless in the grasp of his temperament.  It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle him more roughly.  These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have a short patience.

“When you err, you say, the fault ’s your own,” he said at last.  “It is because your faults are your own that I care about them.”

Rowland’s voice, when he spoke with feeling, had an extraordinary amenity.  Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend’s shoulder.  “You are the best man in the world,” he said, “and I am a vile brute.  Only,” he added in a moment, “you don’t understand me!” And he looked at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one’s own grossness if one failed to read to the bottom of that beautiful soul.

Rowland smiled sadly.  “What is it now?  Explain.”

“Oh, I can’t explain!” cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work.  “I have only one way of expressing my deepest feelings—­it ’s this!” And he swung his tool.  He stood looking at the half-wrought clay for a moment, and then flung the instrument down.  “And even this half the time plays me false!”

Rowland felt that his irritation had not subsided, and he himself had no taste for saying disagreeable things.  Nevertheless he saw no sufficient reason to forbear uttering the words he had had on his conscience from the beginning.  “We must do what we can and be thankful,” he said.  “And let me assure you of this—­that it won’t help you to become entangled with Miss Light.”

Roderick pressed his hand to his forehead with vehemence and then shook it in the air, despairingly; a gesture that had become frequent with him since he had been in Italy.  “No, no, it ’s no use; you don’t understand me!  But I don’t blame you.  You can’t!”

“You think it will help you, then?” said Rowland, wondering.