would send Prince Casamassima and his millions to perdition.  I don’t know what you think of me for saying all this; I suppose we have not climbed up here under the skies to play propriety.  Why have you been at such pains to assure me, after all, that you are a little man and not a great one, a weak one and not a strong?  I innocently imagined that your eyes declared you were strong.  But your voice condemns you; I always wondered at it; it ’s not the voice of a conqueror!”

“Give me something to conquer,” cried Roderick, “and when I say that I thank you from my soul, my voice, whatever you think of it, shall speak the truth!”

Christina for a moment said nothing.  Rowland was too interested to think of moving.  “You pretend to such devotion,” she went on, “and yet I am sure you have never really chosen between me and that person in America.”

“Do me the favor not to speak of her,” said Roderick, imploringly.

“Why not?  I say no ill of her, and I think all kinds of good.  I am certain she is a far better girl than I, and far more likely to make you happy.”

“This is happiness, this present, palpable moment,” said Roderick; “though you have such a genius for saying the things that torture me!”

“It ’s greater happiness than you deserve, then!  You have never chosen, I say; you have been afraid to choose.  You have never really faced the fact that you are false, that you have broken your faith.  You have never looked at it and seen that it was hideous, and yet said, ’No matter, I ’ll brave the penalty, I ‘ll bear the shame!’ You have closed your eyes; you have tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were not behaving as badly as you seemed to be, and there would be some way, after all, of compassing bliss and yet escaping trouble.  You have faltered and drifted, you have gone on from accident to accident, and I am sure that at this present moment you can’t tell what it is you really desire!”

Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent, and his hands clapsed around his legs.  He bent his head and rested his forehead on his knees.

Christina went on with a sort of infernal calmness:  “I believe that, really, you don’t greatly care for your friend in America any more than you do for me.  You are one of the men who care only for themselves and for what they can make of themselves.  That ’s very well when they can make something great, and I could interest myself in a man of extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his passions to account.  But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary?  Fancy feeling one’s self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent!  If you have doubts about yourself, I can’t reassure you; I have too many doubts myself, about everything in this weary world.  You have gone up like a rocket, in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come down like the stick?  I don’t pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I have said before—­that