Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/174

 Rowland looked, at this, conscientiously blank. "For God's sake," he said, "don't play such dangerous games with your facility. If you've got facility, respect it, nurse it, adore it, save it up in an old stocking—don't speculate on it." And he wondered what his companion, up to his knees in debt, would have done if there had been no good-natured Rowland Mallet to lend a helping hand. But he did n't express his curiosity in words, and the contingency seemed not to have presented itself to Roderick's imagination. The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is; with a detachment that flowered little by little into free anecdote quite as if they had been the adventures of some other, some different, ass. He related half a dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this ventilation, wondered, with laughter, that such absurdities could have been. Rowland sat perfectly grave—he kept it up on principle. Then Roderick began to talk of half a dozen plastic ideas that he had in his head, and set them forth with his old inimitable touch. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassée had, poor dear, in her make-up, some wonderful, beautiful lines. Rowland at last said that such experiments might pass if one felt one was really the wiser for them. "By the wiser," he sententiously added, "I mean the stronger in 140