“America—­the Mountains—­the Moon!” said Gloriani.  “You ’ll find it rather hard, I ’m afraid, to compress such subjects into classic forms.”

“Oh, there ’s a way,” cried Roderick, “and I shall think it out.  My figures shall make no contortions, but they shall mean a tremendous deal.”

“I ’m sure there are contortions enough in Michael Angelo,” said Madame Grandoni.  “Perhaps you don’t approve of him.”

“Oh, Michael Angelo was not me!” said Roderick, with sublimity.  There was a great laugh; but after all, Roderick had done some fine things.

Rowland had bidden one of the servants bring him a small portfolio of prints, and had taken out a photograph of Roderick’s little statue of the youth drinking.  It pleased him to see his friend sitting there in radiant ardor, defending idealism against so knowing an apostle of corruption as Gloriani, and he wished to help the elder artist to be confuted.  He silently handed him the photograph.

“Bless me!” cried Gloriani, “did he do this?”

“Ages ago,” said Roderick.

Gloriani looked at the photograph a long time, with evident admiration.

“It ’s deucedly pretty,” he said at last.  “But, my dear young friend, you can’t keep this up.”

“I shall do better,” said Roderick.

“You will do worse!  You will become weak.  You will have to take to violence, to contortions, to romanticism, in self-defense.  This sort of thing is like a man trying to lift himself up by the seat of his trousers.  He may stand on tiptoe, but he can’t do more.  Here you stand on tiptoe, very gracefully, I admit; but you can’t fly; there ’s no use trying.”

“My ‘America’ shall answer you!” said Roderick, shaking toward him a tall glass of champagne and drinking it down.

Singleton had taken the photograph and was poring over it with a little murmur of delight.

“Was this done in America?” he asked.

“In a square white wooden house at Northampton, Massachusetts,” Roderick answered.

“Dear old white wooden houses!” said Miss Blanchard.

“If you could do as well as this there,” said Singleton, blushing and smiling, “one might say that really you had only to lose by coming to Rome.”

“Mallet is to blame for that,” said Roderick.  “But I am willing to risk the loss.”

The photograph had been passed to Madame Grandoni.  “It reminds me,” she said, “of the things a young man used to do whom I knew years ago, when I first came to Rome.  He was a German, a pupil of Overbeck and a votary of spiritual art.  He used to wear a black velvet tunic and a very low shirt collar; he had a neck like a sickly crane, and let his hair grow down to his shoulders.  His name was Herr Schafgans.  He never painted anything so profane as a man taking a drink, but his figures were all of the simple and slender and angular pattern, and nothing if not innocent—­like this one