“What is your subject?” asked Roderick.

“Don’t take it ill,” said Gloriani.  “You know I ’m the very deuce for observation.  She would make a magnificent Herodias!”

If Roderick had taken it ill (which was unlikely, for we know he thought Gloriani an ass, and expected little of his wisdom), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in a sort of mental prostration before both bust and artist.  But Roderick’s attitude before his patient little devotee was one of undisguised though friendly amusement; and, indeed, judged from a strictly plastic point of view, the poor fellow’s diminutive stature, his enormous mouth, his pimples and his yellow hair were sufficiently ridiculous.  “Nay, don’t envy our friend,” Rowland said to Singleton afterwards, on his expressing, with a little groan of depreciation of his own paltry performances, his sense of the brilliancy of Roderick’s talent.  “You sail nearer the shore, but you sail in smoother waters.  Be contented with what you are and paint me another picture.”

“Oh, I don’t envy Hudson anything he possesses,” Singleton said, “because to take anything away would spoil his beautiful completeness.  ‘Complete,’ that ’s what he is; while we little clevernesses are like half-ripened plums, only good eating on the side that has had a glimpse of the sun.  Nature has made him so, and fortune confesses to it!  He is the handsomest fellow in Rome, he has the most genius, and, as a matter of course, the most beautiful girl in the world comes and offers to be his model.  If that is not completeness, where shall we find it?”

One morning, going into Roderick’s studio, Rowland found the young sculptor entertaining Miss Blanchard—­if this is not too flattering a description of his gracefully passive tolerance of her presence.  He had never liked her and never climbed into her sky-studio to observe her wonderful manipulation of petals.  He had once quoted Tennyson against her:—­

“And is there any moral shut
Within the bosom of the rose?”

“In all Miss Blanchard’s roses you may be sure there is a moral,” he had said.  “You can see it sticking out its head, and, if you go to smell the flower, it scratches your nose.”  But on this occasion she had come with a propitiatory gift—­introducing her friend Mr. Leavenworth.  Mr. Leavenworth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-favored face, which seemed, somehow, to have more room in it than was occupied by a smile of superior benevolence, so that (with his smooth, white forehead) it bore a certain resemblance to a large parlor with a very florid carpet, but no pictures on the walls.  He held his head high, talked sonorously, and told Roderick, within five minutes, that he was a widower, traveling to distract his mind, and that he had lately retired from the proprietorship of large mines of borax in Pennsylvania.  Roderick supposed at first that, in his character of depressed widower, he had come to order a tombstone; but observing then the extreme blandness of his address to Miss Blanchard, he credited him with a judicious prevision that by the time the tombstone was completed, a monument of his inconsolability might have become an anachronism.  But Mr. Leavenworth was disposed to order something.