Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/131

 bedecked beast. "I 've been wanting a subject," said Roderick; "there 's one made to my hand! And now to tackle it!"

They saw no more of the marvellous maiden, though Roderick looked hopefully for some days into the carriages on the Pincian. She had evidently only been passing through Rome; Naples or Florence now happily possessed her, and she was guiding her fleecy companion through the Villa Reale or the Boboli Gardens with the same superb defiance of irony. Roderick went to work and spent a month shut up in his studio; he had an idea, and he was not to rest till he had embodied it. He had established himself in the basement of a huge, dusky, dilapidated old house in that long, tortuous and pre-eminently Roman street which leads, under more than one name, from the Corso to the Bridge of Saint Angelo. The black archway which admitted you might have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was formed by a narrow terrace overhanging the Tiber. Here, along the parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture, with a couple of meagre orange-trees in terra-cotta tubs and an oleander that never flowered. The unclean historic river swept beneath; behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of Saint Angelo, tipped with its seraphic statue, the dome of Saint Peter's 97