“I can’t work any more,” said Roderick.  “You have upset me!  I ’ll go and stroll on the Pincian.”  And he tossed aside his working-jacket and prepared himself for the street.  As he was arranging his cravat before the glass, something occurred to him which made him thoughtful.  He stopped a few moments afterward, as they were going out, with his hand on the door-knob.  “You did, from your own point of view, an indiscreet thing,” he said, “to tell Miss Light of my engagement.”

Rowland looked at him with a glance which was partly an interrogation, but partly, also, an admission.

“If she ’s the coquette you say,” Roderick added, “you have given her a reason the more.”

“And that ’s the girl you propose to devote yourself to?” cried Rowland.

“Oh, I don’t say it, mind!  I only say that she ’s the most interesting creature in the world!  The next time you mean to render me a service, pray give me notice beforehand!”

It was perfectly characteristic of Roderick that, a fortnight later, he should have let his friend know that he depended upon him for society at Frascati, as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed between them.  Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be displeased with him.  It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he complied with his friend’s summons without a moment’s hesitation.  His cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was the dupe of his intense benevolence.  She put the case with too little favor, or too much, as the reader chooses; it is certain, at least, that he had a constitutional tendency towards magnanimous interpretations.  Nothing happened, however, to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick’s secondary impulses were wiser than his primary ones, and that the rounded total of his nature had a harmony perfectly attuned to the most amiable of its brilliant parts.  Roderick’s humor, for the time, was pitched in a minor key; he was lazy, listless, and melancholy, but he had never been more friendly and kindly and appealingly submissive.  Winter had begun, by the calendar, but the weather was divinely mild, and the two young men took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged away the mornings in the villas.  The villas at Frascati are delicious places, and replete with romantic suggestiveness.  Roderick, as he had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his meditations, Rowland was perfectly willing to bear him company and coax along the process.  But Roderick let him know from the first that he was in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr. Leavenworth.