One of them was an American sculptor of French extraction, or remotely, perhaps, of Italian, for he rejoiced in the somewhat fervid name of Gloriani.  He was a man of forty, he had been living for years in Paris and in Rome, and he now drove a very pretty trade in sculpture of the ornamental and fantastic sort.  In his youth he had had money; but he had spent it recklessly, much of it scandalously, and at twenty-six had found himself obliged to make capital of his talent.  This was quite inimitable, and fifteen years of indefatigable exercise had brought it to perfection.  Rowland admitted its power, though it gave him very little pleasure; what he relished in the man was the extraordinary vivacity and frankness, not to call it the impudence, of his ideas.  He had a definite, practical scheme of art, and he knew at least what he meant.  In this sense he was solid and complete.  There were so many of the aesthetic fraternity who were floundering in unknown seas, without a notion of which way their noses were turned, that Gloriani, conscious and compact, unlimitedly intelligent and consummately clever, dogmatic only as to his own duties, and at once gracefully deferential and profoundly indifferent to those of others, had for Rowland a certain intellectual refreshment quite independent of the character of his works.  These were considered by most people to belong to a very corrupt, and by many to a positively indecent school.  Others thought them tremendously knowing, and paid enormous prices for them; and indeed, to be able to point to one of Gloriani’s figures in a shady corner of your library was tolerable proof that you were not a fool.  Corrupt things they certainly were; in the line of sculpture they were quite the latest fruit of time.  It was the artist’s opinion that there is no essential difference between beauty and ugliness; that they overlap and intermingle in a quite inextricable manner; that there is no saying where one begins and the other ends; that hideousness grimaces at you suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms before your eyes in the lap of vileness; that it is a waste of wit to nurse metaphysical distinctions, and a sadly meagre entertainment to caress imaginary lines; that the thing to aim at is the expressive, and the way to reach it is by ingenuity; that for this purpose everything may serve, and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque.  Its prime duty is to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination.  Gloriani’s statues were florid and meretricious; they looked like magnified goldsmith’s work.  They were extremely elegant, but they had no charm for Rowland.  He never bought one, but Gloriani was such an honest fellow, and withal was so deluged with orders, that this made no difference in their friendship.  The artist might have passed for a Frenchman.  He was a great talker, and a very picturesque one; he was almost bald; he had a small, bright eye, a broken nose, and a moustache with waxed ends.  When sometimes he received you at his lodging, he introduced you to a lady with a plain face whom he called Madame Gloriani—­which she was not.