Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/181

 "That's because you yourself try to sit like an angel on a cloud. This present idea of Hudson's is full of possibilities, and he 'll pull some of them off; but it is n't the sancta simplicitas of a few months ago. He has taken his turn sooner than I supposed. What has happened to him? Has he been disappointed in love? But that 's none of my business. I congratulate him on having found his feet or at least found such a smart pair of shoes."

Roderick, however, was less to be congratulated than Gloriani had taken it into his head to believe. He was discontented with his work, he applied himself to it by fits and starts, he declared that he did n't know what was in store for him; he was turning into a man of moods. "Is this of necessity what a fellow must come to?" he asked of Rowland with a peremptory flash in his eye, a look seeming to imply that his companion had undertaken to insure him against perplexities and was not fulfilling his contract — "this damnable uncertainty when one goes to bed at night as to whether one is going to wake up in an ecstasy or in a tantrum? Have we only a season, over before we know it, in which to call our faculties our own? Six months ago I could stand up to my work like a man, day after day, and never dream of asking myself how I felt. But now, some mornings, it 's the very devil to get going. My experiment looks so base when I come into the studio that I 've twenty minds to smash it on the spot, and I lose three or four hours in sitting there moping and getting used to it."

Rowland said that he supposed that these changes of intellectual weather, these occasional obscurations 147