Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/133

 polished carvings and mellow paintings, the two friends sat with their heads together, criticising intaglios and etchings, water-colour drawings and illuminated missals. Roderick's quick appreciation of every form of artistic beauty reminded his companion of the flexible temperament of those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engineers. When at his times of most seeing he saw the young sculptor's day pass in a single sustained flight, while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half suppressed, some of them, for conscience' sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in possession, he felt a pang of some envious pain. But Rowland had two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment; he was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rambling rider. He plunged into bulky German octavos on Italian history and, during long afternoons spent in the saddle, ranged over the grassy desert that encircles Rome. As the season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves he found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy occasion to know others. He enjoyed the quiet corner of a drawing-room beside an agreeable woman, and, though the machinery of what calls itself society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such observances is to take 99