bores me to death; it makes me sick.  Hang it, why can’t a poor fellow enjoy things in peace?  My illusions are all broken-winded; they won’t carry me twenty paces!  I can’t laugh and forget; my laugh dies away before it begins.  Your friend Stendhal writes on his book-covers (I never got farther) that he has seen too early in life la beaute parfaite.  I don’t know how early he saw it; I saw it before I was born—­in another state of being!  I can’t describe it positively; I can only say I don’t find it anywhere now.  Not at the bottom of champagne glasses; not, strange as it may seem, in that extra half-yard or so of shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose.  I don’t find it at merry supper-tables, where half a dozen ugly men with pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; not when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets, and go out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there like gnawed bones stuck into the earth.  Everything is mean and dusky and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant society are the meanest and shabbiest of all.  They have no real spontaneity; they are all cowards and popinjays.  They have no more dignity than so many grasshoppers.  Nothing is good but one!” And he jumped up and stood looking at one of his statues, which shone vaguely across the room in the dim lamplight.

“Yes, do tell us,” said Rowland, “what to hold on by!”

“Those things of mine were tolerably good,” he answered.  “But my idea was better—­and that ’s what I mean!”

Rowland said nothing.  He was willing to wait for Roderick to complete the circle of his metamorphoses, but he had no desire to officiate as chorus to the play.  If Roderick chose to fish in troubled waters, he must land his prizes himself.

“You think I ’m an impudent humbug,” the latter said at last, “coming up to moralize at this hour of the night.  You think I want to throw dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent.  That ’s your eminently rational view of the case.”

“Excuse me from taking any view at all,” said Rowland.

“You have given me up, then?”

“No, I have merely suspended judgment.  I am waiting.”

“You have ceased then positively to believe in me?”

Rowland made an angry gesture.  “Oh, cruel boy!  When you have hit your mark and made people care for you, you should n’t twist your weapon about at that rate in their vitals.  Allow me to say I am sleepy.  Good night!”

Some days afterward it happened that Rowland, on a long afternoon ramble, took his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere.  He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it.  As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses