you, dear friend; you would draw it too mild; you have too much of the milk of human kindness.  I have fits of horrible homesickness for my studio, and I shall be devoutly grateful when the summer is over and I can go back and swing a chisel.  I feel as if nothing but the chisel would satisfy me; as if I could rush in a rage at a block of unshaped marble.  There are a lot of the Roman people here, English and American; I live in the midst of them and talk nonsense from morning till night.  There is also some one else; and to her I don’t talk sense, nor, thank heaven, mean what I say.  I confess, I need a month’s work to recover my self-respect.”

These lines brought Rowland no small perturbation; the more, that what they seemed to point to surprised him.  During the nine months of their companionship Roderick had shown so little taste for dissipation that Rowland had come to think of it as a canceled danger, and it greatly perplexed him to learn that his friend had apparently proved so pliant to opportunity.  But Roderick’s allusions were ambiguous, and it was possible they might simply mean that he was out of patience with a frivolous way of life and fretting wholesomely over his absent work.  It was a very good thing, certainly, that idleness should prove, on experiment, to sit heavily on his conscience.  Nevertheless, the letter needed, to Rowland’s mind, a key:  the key arrived a week later.  “In common charity,” Roderick wrote, “lend me a hundred pounds!  I have gambled away my last franc—­I have made a mountain of debts.  Send me the money first; lecture me afterwards!” Rowland sent the money by return of mail; then he proceeded, not to lecture, but to think.  He hung his head; he was acutely disappointed.  He had no right to be, he assured himself; but so it was.  Roderick was young, impulsive, unpracticed in stoicism; it was a hundred to one that he was to pay the usual vulgar tribute to folly.  But his friend had regarded it as securely gained to his own belief in virtue that he was not as other foolish youths are, and that he would have been capable of looking at folly in the face and passing on his way.  Rowland for a while felt a sore sense of wrath.  What right had a man who was engaged to that fine girl in Northampton to behave as if his consciousness were a common blank, to be overlaid with coarse sensations?  Yes, distinctly, he was disappointed.  He had accompanied his missive with an urgent recommendation to leave Baden-Baden immediately, and an offer to meet Roderick at any point he would name.  The answer came promptly; it ran as follows:  “Send me another fifty pounds!  I have been back to the tables.  I will leave as soon as the money comes, and meet you at Geneva.  There I will tell you everything.”