“Gloriani ’s an ass!” said Roderick, almost fiercely.  He hired a horse and began to ride with Rowland on the Campagna.  This delicious amusement restored him in a measure to cheerfulness, but seemed to Rowland on the whole not to stimulate his industry.  Their rides were always very long, and Roderick insisted on making them longer by dismounting in picturesque spots and stretching himself in the sun among a heap of overtangled stones.  He let the scorching Roman luminary beat down upon him with an equanimity which Rowland found it hard to emulate.  But in this situation Roderick talked so much amusing nonsense that, for the sake of his company, Rowland consented to be uncomfortable, and often forgot that, though in these diversions the days passed quickly, they brought forth neither high art nor low.  And yet it was perhaps by their help, after all, that Roderick secured several mornings of ardent work on his new figure, and brought it to rapid completion.  One afternoon, when it was finished, Rowland went to look at it, and Roderick asked him for his opinion.

“What do you think yourself?” Rowland demanded, not from pusillanimity, but from real uncertainty.

“I think it is curiously bad,” Roderick answered.  “It was bad from the first; it has fundamental vices.  I have shuffled them in a measure out of sight, but I have not corrected them.  I can’t—­I can’t—­I can’t!” he cried passionately.  “They stare me in the face—­they are all I see!”

Rowland offered several criticisms of detail, and suggested certain practicable changes.  But Roderick differed with him on each of these points; the thing had faults enough, but they were not those faults.  Rowland, unruffled, concluded by saying that whatever its faults might be, he had an idea people in general would like it.

“I wish to heaven some person in particular would buy it, and take it off my hands and out of my sight!” Roderick cried.  “What am I to do now?” he went on.  “I have n’t an idea.  I think of subjects, but they remain mere lifeless names.  They are mere words—­they are not images.  What am I to do?”

Rowland was a trifle annoyed.  “Be a man,” he was on the point of saying, “and don’t, for heaven’s sake, talk in that confoundedly querulous voice.”  But before he had uttered the words, there rang through the studio a loud, peremptory ring at the outer door.

Roderick broke into a laugh.  “Talk of the devil,” he said, “and you see his horns!  If that ’s not a customer, it ought to be.”

The door of the studio was promptly flung open, and a lady advanced to the threshold—­an imposing, voluminous person, who quite filled up the doorway.  Rowland immediately felt that he had seen her before, but he recognized her only when she moved forward and disclosed an attendant in the person of a little bright-eyed, elderly gentleman, with a bristling white moustache.  Then he remembered that just a year before he and his companion had seen in the Ludovisi