“Open doors?” murmured Roderick.  “Yes, let us close no doors that open upon Rome.  For this, for the mind, is eternal summer!  But though my doors may stand open to-day,” he presently added, “I shall see no visitors.  I want to pause and breathe; I want to dream of a statue.  I have been working hard for three months; I have earned a right to a reverie.”

Rowland, on his side, was not without provision for reflection, and they lingered on in broken, desultory talk.  Rowland felt the need for intellectual rest, for a truce to present care for churches, statues, and pictures, on even better grounds than his companion, inasmuch as he had really been living Roderick’s intellectual life the past three months, as well as his own.  As he looked back on these full-flavored weeks, he drew a long breath of satisfaction, almost of relief.  Roderick, thus far, had justified his confidence and flattered his perspicacity; he was rapidly unfolding into an ideal brilliancy.  He was changed even more than he himself suspected; he had stepped, without faltering, into his birthright, and was spending money, intellectually, as lavishly as a young heir who has just won an obstructive lawsuit.  Roderick’s glance and voice were the same, doubtless, as when they enlivened the summer dusk on Cecilia’s veranda, but in his person, generally, there was an indefinable expression of experience rapidly and easily assimilated.  Rowland had been struck at the outset with the instinctive quickness of his observation and his free appropriation of whatever might serve his purpose.  He had not been, for instance, half an hour on English soil before he perceived that he was dressed like a rustic, and he had immediately reformed his toilet with the most unerring tact.  His appetite for novelty was insatiable, and for everything characteristically foreign, as it presented itself, he had an extravagant greeting; but in half an hour the novelty had faded, he had guessed the secret, he had plucked out the heart of the mystery and was clamoring for a keener sensation.  At the end of a month, he presented, mentally, a puzzling spectacle to his companion.  He had caught, instinctively, the key-note of the old world.  He observed and enjoyed, he criticised and rhapsodized, but though all things interested him and many delighted him, none surprised him; he had divined their logic and measured their proportions, and referred them infallibly to their categories.  Witnessing the rate at which he did intellectual execution on the general spectacle of European life, Rowland at moments felt vaguely uneasy for the future; the boy was living too fast, he would have said, and giving alarming pledges to ennui in his later years.  But we must live as our pulses are timed, and Roderick’s struck the hour very often.  He was, by imagination, though he never became in manner, a natural man of the world; he had intuitively, as an artist, what one may call the historic consciousness.  He had a relish for