Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/154

 "My colossal 'America' shall answer you!" said Roderick, shaking towards him a tall glass of champagne and drinking it down.

Singleton had taken the photograph and was poring over it with a little murmur of delight. "Was this done in America?" he asked.

"In a square white wooden house at Northampton Mass," Roderick answered.

"Dear old white wooden houses!" said Miss Blanchard. "Dear old Northampton, dear old 'Mass'!"

"If you could do as well as this there," said Singleton blushing and smiling, "one might say that really you had only to lose by coming to Rome."

"Our host's to blame for that," said Roderick. "But I 'm willing to risk the danger."

The photograph had been passed to Madame Grandoni, whose eyeglass had the handle of a warming-pan. "It resembles," she said, "the things a young man used to do whom I knew years ago, when I first came to Rome. He was a German, a pupil of Overbeck and a votary of spiritual art. He used to wear a black velvet tunic and a very low shirt-collar; he had a neck like a sickly crane and he let his hair grow down to his shoulders. His name was Herr Schafgans. He never painted anything so profane as a man taking a drink, for none of his people had anything so vulgar as an appetite. They were all angles and edges—they looked like diagrams of human nature. They were figures if you please, but geometrical figures. He would n't have agreed with Gloriani any more than you. He used to come 120