us, but an experiment?  Do I succeed—­do I fail?  It does n’t depend on me.  I ’m prepared for failure.  It won’t be a disappointment, simply because I shan’t survive it.  The end of my work shall be the end of my life.  When I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game.  I ’m not making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won’t add insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble.  But I have a conviction that if the hour strikes here,” and he tapped his forehead, “I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud!  For the past ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming before my eyes.  My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!”

Rowland listened to this outbreak, as he often had occasion to listen to Roderick’s heated monologues, with a number of mental restrictions.  Both in gravity and in gayety he said more than he meant, and you did him simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a character as his florid diction implied.  The moods of an artist, his exaltations and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set his copy.  He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but he writes a magnificent hand.  It was nevertheless true that at present poor Roderick gave unprecedented tokens of moral stagnation, and as for genius being held by the precarious tenure he had sketched, Rowland was at a loss to see whence he could borrow the authority to contradict him.  He sighed to himself, and wished that his companion had a trifle more of little Sam Singleton’s evenness of impulse.  But then, was Singleton a man of genius?  He answered that such reflections seemed to him unprofitable, not to say morbid; that the proof of the pudding was in the eating; that he did n’t know about bringing a genius that had palpably spent its last breath back to life again, but that he was satisfied that vigorous effort was a cure for a great many ills that seemed far gone.  “Don’t heed your mood,” he said, “and don’t believe there is any calm so dead that your own lungs can’t ruffle it with a breeze.  If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.”

“Set to work and produce abortions!” cried Roderick with ire.  “Preach that to others.  Production with me must be either pleasure or nothing.  As I said just now, I must either stay in the saddle or not go at all.  I won’t do second-rate work; I can’t if I would.  I have no cleverness, apart from inspiration.  I am not a Gloriani!  You are right,” he added after a while; “this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache.  I shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a bright idea or two.”