One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi.  They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus.  Then they had wandered out into the gardens, and were lounging away the morning under the spell of their magical picturesqueness.  Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else; that, after the Juno, it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees.  There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects.  But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it could n’t be worth a fig, and that he did n’t care to look at ugly things.  He remained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on the grass, while Rowland went off envying the intellectual comfort of genius, which can arrive at serene conclusions without disagreeable processes.  When the latter came back, his friend was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.  Rowland, in the geniality of a mood attuned to the mellow charm of a Roman villa, found a good word to say for the Guercino; but he chiefly talked of the view from the little belvedere on the roof of the casino, and how it looked like the prospect from a castle turret in a fairy tale.

“Very likely,” said Roderick, throwing himself back with a yawn.  “But I must let it pass.  I have seen enough for the present; I have reached the top of the hill.  I have an indigestion of impressions; I must work them off before I go in for any more.  I don’t want to look at any more of other people’s works, for a month—­not even at Nature’s own.  I want to look at Roderick Hudson’s.  The result of it all is that I ’m not afraid.  I can but try, as well as the rest of them!  The fellow who did that gazing goddess yonder only made an experiment.  The other day, when I was looking at Michael Angelo’s Moses, I was seized with a kind of defiance—­a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of grandeur.  It was a rousing great success, certainly, that rose there before me, but somehow it was not an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as well, but that at least I might!”

“As you say, you can but try,” said Rowland.  “Success is only passionate effort.”

“Well, the passion is blazing; we have been piling on fuel handsomely.  It came over me just now that it is exactly three months to a day since I left Northampton.  I can’t believe it!”

“It certainly seems more.”

“It seems like ten years.  What an exquisite ass I was!”

“Do you feel so wise now?”

“Verily!  Don’t I look so?  Surely I have n’t the same face.  Have n’t I a different eye, a different expression, a different voice?”