against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola, and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square.  In Rome his first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again.  But the old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he really found what he had been looking for from the first—­the complete antipodes of Northampton.  And indeed Rome is the natural home of those spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick—­the spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and the infinite superpositions of history.  It is the immemorial city of convention.  The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows.  And in that still recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to men’s eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four black horses.  Roderick’s first fortnight was a high aesthetic revel.  He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than he could express:  he was sure that life must have there, for all one’s senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must happen to one than anywhere else.  And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded.  Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick’s favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live largely enough without exceeding the circle of wholesome curiosity.  Rowland took immense satisfaction in his companion’s deep impatience to make something of all his impressions.  Some of these indeed found their way into a channel which did not lead to statues, but it was none the less a safe one.  He wrote frequent long letters to Miss Garland; when Rowland went with him to post them he thought wistfully of the fortune of the great loosely-written missives, which cost Roderick unconscionable sums in postage.  He received punctual answers of a more frugal form, written in a clear, minute hand, on paper vexatiously thin.  If Rowland was present when they came, he turned away and thought of other things—­or tried to.  These were the only moments when his sympathy halted, and they were brief.  For the rest he let the days go by unprotestingly, and enjoyed Roderick’s serene efflorescence as he would have done a beautiful summer sunrise.  Rome, for the past month, had been delicious.  The annual descent of the Goths had not yet begun, and sunny leisure seemed to brood over the city.