“Thirty years ago?  Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where strange things happen!  But happy things too, since I have your renewed permission to call.  You do me too much honor.  Is it in the morning or in the evening that I should least intrude?”

“Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come, sometime.  I depend upon you,” said Rowland.

The Cavaliere thanked him with an humble obeisance.  To the Cavaliere, too, he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic, but the idea of pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.

Miss Light’s bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick’s studio, and half the foreign colony came to see it.  With the completion of his work, however, Roderick’s visits at the Palazzo F——­ by no means came to an end.  He spent half his time in Mrs. Light’s drawing-room, and began to be talked about as “attentive” to Christina.  The success of the bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humor he suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in his thoughts.  Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener than speaker; partly because Roderick’s own tone was so resonant and exultant, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for having called her unsafe, he was too perplexed to defend himself.  The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex, willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper.  And yet he strongly felt her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination!  Roderick, in the glow of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal, was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her beauty.

“I had no idea of it,” he said, “till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve.  Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands.  Not a line without meaning, not a hair’s breadth that is not admirably finished.  And then her mouth!  It ’s as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!” Later, after he had been working for a week, he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain, she would still be the most fascinating of women.  “I ’ve quite forgotten her beauty,” he said, “or rather I have ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her.  She is all one, and all consummately interesting!”

“What does she do—­what does she say, that is so remarkable?” Rowland had asked.

“Say?  Sometimes nothing—­sometimes everything.  She is never the same.  Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore.  She hardly looks at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work.  On other days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions, and pours out the most irresistible nonsense.  She is a creature of moods; you can’t count upon her; she keeps observation on the stretch.  And then, bless you, she has seen such a lot!  Her talk is full of the oddest allusions!”