Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/125

 ; all this made comradeship a high, rare communion and interfused with a deeper amenity the wanderings and contemplations that beguiled their pilgrimage to Rome.

They had gone almost immediately to Paris and had spent their days at the Louvre and their evenings at the theatre. Roderick was divided in mind as to whether Titian or Mademoiselle Delaporte were the greater artist. They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had passed a fortnight in Venice and another in Florence, and had now been a month in Rome. Roderick had said that he meant to spend three months in simply looking, absorbing and reflecting, without putting pencil to paper. He looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things—things greater doubtless at times than the intention of the artist. And yet he made few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to like and to dislike. He judged instinctively and passionately, but never vulgarly. At Venice for a couple of days he had half a fit of melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way and that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the colouring of Titian and the Veronese. Then one morning the two young men had themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier make, in high relief against the sky of the Adriatic, muscular movements of a breadth and grace that he had never seen equalled. At the end he jerked himself up, with a violence that nearly swamped the boat, to 91