Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/255

, and Roderick had to every appearance as deliberately accepted it. Rowland indeed had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion's easy, inexpressive assent to his interest in him. "Here 's an uncommonly fine thing," he said to himself; "a nature all unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of—knocks the bottom out of pride." His reflective judgement of his companion, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in the other's whole personality that appealed to his tenderness and charmed his understanding, had never for an instant faltered. He listened to Roderick's last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled—with bitterness.

"I don't at all like your telling me I'm meddlesome. If I had n't been meddlesome I should never have cared a fig for you."

Roderick flushed deeply and thrust his modelling-tool up to the handle into the clay. "Say it outright—as you want to. You 've been an awful fool to believe in me."

"I don't want to say it, and you don't honestly believe I do," said Rowland, all in patience. "It seems to me I 'm really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense."

Roderick sat down, crossed his arms and fixed his eyes on the floor. Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly perceived him as all strangely and endlessly mixed—with his abundance and his scarcity, his power 221