There is an ancient terrace at Geneva, planted with trees and studded with benches, overlooked by gravely aristocratic old dwellings and overlooking the distant Alps.  A great many generations have made it a lounging-place, a great many friends and lovers strolled there, a great many confidential talks and momentous interviews gone forward.  Here, one morning, sitting on one of the battered green benches, Roderick, as he had promised, told his friend everything.  He had arrived late the night before; he looked tired, and yet flushed and excited.  He made no professions of penitence, but he practiced an unmitigated frankness, and his self-reprobation might be taken for granted.  He implied in every phrase that he had done with it all, and that he was counting the hours till he could get back to work.  We shall not rehearse his confession in detail; its main outline will be sufficient.  He had fallen in with some very idle people, and had discovered that a little example and a little practice were capable of producing on his own part a considerable relish for their diversions.  What could he do?  He never read, and he had no studio; in one way or another he had to pass the time.  He passed it in dangling about several very pretty women in wonderful Paris toilets, and reflected that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit under a tree, looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and show its teeth.  Attached to these ladies were certain gentlemen who walked about in clouds of perfume, rose at midday, and supped at midnight.  Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them very amusing fellows.  He was surprised at his own taste, but he let it take its course.  It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies who expect you to present them with expensive bouquets, to ride with them in the Black Forest on well-looking horses, to come into their opera-boxes on nights when Patti sang and prices were consequent, to propose little light suppers at the Conversation House after the opera or drives by moonlight to the Castle, to be always arrayed and anointed, trinketed and gloved,—­that to move in such society, we say, though it might be a privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached.  But the tables made such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables.  Roderick tried them and found that at first they smoothed his path delightfully.  This simplification of matters, however, was only momentary, for he soon perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed a good-looking young man to peculiar liabilities.  At this point of his friend’s narrative, Rowland was reminded of Madame de Cruchecassee in The Newcomes, and though he had listened in tranquil silence to the rest of it, he found it hard not to say that all this had been, under the circumstances, a very bad business.  Roderick admitted it with bitterness, and then told how much—­measured simply financially—­it had cost him.  His luck had changed; the tables had ceased to back him, and he had found himself up to his knees in debt.  Every penny had gone of the solid sum which had seemed a large equivalent of those shining statues in Rome.  He had been an ass, but it was not irreparable; he could make another statue in a couple of months.