“I ’ve been too absurdly docile.  I ’ve been sprawling all my days by the maternal fireside, and my dear mother has grown used to bullying me.  I ’ve made myself cheap!  If I ’m not in my bed by eleven o’clock, the girl is sent out to explore with a lantern.  When I think of it, I fairly despise my amiability.  It ’s rather a hard fate, to live like a saint and to pass for a sinner!  I should like for six months to lead Mrs. Hudson the life some fellows lead their mothers!”

“Allow me to believe,” said Rowland, “that you would like nothing of the sort.  If you have been a good boy, don’t spoil it by pretending you don’t like it.  You have been very happy, I suspect, in spite of your virtues, and there are worse fates in the world than being loved too well.  I have not had the pleasure of seeing your mother, but I would lay you a wager that that is the trouble.  She is passionately fond of you, and her hopes, like all intense hopes, keep trembling into fears.”  Rowland, as he spoke, had an instinctive vision of how such a beautiful young fellow must be loved by his female relatives.

Roderick frowned, and with an impatient gesture, “I do her justice,” he cried.  “May she never do me less!” Then after a moment’s hesitation, “I ’ll tell you the perfect truth,” he went on.  “I have to fill a double place.  I have to be my brother as well as myself.  It ’s a good deal to ask of a man, especially when he has so little talent as I for being what he is not.  When we were both young together I was the curled darling.  I had the silver mug and the biggest piece of pudding, and I stayed in-doors to be kissed by the ladies while he made mud-pies in the garden and was never missed, of course.  Really, he was worth fifty of me!  When he was brought home from Vicksburg with a piece of shell in his skull, my poor mother began to think she had n’t loved him enough.  I remember, as she hung round my neck sobbing, before his coffin, she told me that I must be to her everything that he would have been.  I swore in tears and in perfect good faith that I would, but naturally I have not kept my promise.  I have been utterly different.  I have been idle, restless, egotistical, discontented.  I have done no harm, I believe, but I have done no good.  My brother, if he had lived, would have made fifty thousand dollars and put gas and water into the house.  My mother, brooding night and day on her bereavement, has come to fix her ideal in offices of that sort.  Judged by that standard I ’m nowhere!”

Rowland was at loss how to receive this account of his friend’s domestic circumstances; it was plaintive, and yet the manner seemed to him over-trenchant.  “You must lose no time in making a masterpiece,” he answered; “then with the proceeds you can give her gas from golden burners.”