social subtleties and mysteries, and, in perception, when occasion offered him an inch he never failed to take an ell.  A single glimpse of a social situation of the elder type enabled him to construct the whole, with all its complex chiaroscuro, and Rowland more than once assured him that he made him believe in the metempsychosis, and that he must have lived in European society, in the last century, as a gentleman in a cocked hat and brocaded waistcoat.  Hudson asked Rowland questions which poor Rowland was quite unable to answer, and of which he was equally unable to conceive where he had picked up the data.  Roderick ended by answering them himself, tolerably to his satisfaction, and in a short time he had almost turned the tables and become in their walks and talks the accredited source of information.  Rowland told him that when he turned sculptor a capital novelist was spoiled, and that to match his eye for social detail one would have to go to Honore de Balzac.  In all this Rowland took a generous pleasure; he felt an especial kindness for his comrade’s radiant youthfulness of temperament.  He was so much younger than he himself had ever been!  And surely youth and genius, hand in hand, were the most beautiful sight in the world.  Roderick added to this the charm of his more immediately personal qualities.  The vivacity of his perceptions, the audacity of his imagination, the picturesqueness of his phrase when he was pleased,—­and even more when he was displeased,—­his abounding good-humor, his candor, his unclouded frankness, his unfailing impulse to share every emotion and impression with his friend; all this made comradeship a pure felicity, and interfused with a deeper amenity their long evening talks at cafe doors in Italian towns.

They had gone almost immediately to Paris, and had spent their days at the Louvre and their evenings at the theatre.  Roderick was divided in mind as to whether Titian or Mademoiselle Delaporte was the greater artist.  They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had spent a fortnight in Venice and another in Florence, and had now been a month in Rome.  Roderick had said that he meant to spend three months in simply looking, absorbing, and reflecting, without putting pencil to paper.  He looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things—­things greater, doubtless, at times, than the intentions of the artist.  And yet he made few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to like and to dislike.  He judged instinctively and passionately, but never vulgarly.  At Venice, for a couple of days, he had half a fit of melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way, and that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the coloring of Titian and Paul Veronese.  Then one morning the two young men had themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements, in high relief,