Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/256

 to charm and his power to hurt, the possibilities of his egotism, the uncertainties of his temper, the delicacies of his mind. It would have made him quite sick, however, to think that on the whole the values in such a spirit were not much larger than the voids, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in it that he felt just now more than ever that a fine moral agitation, adding a zest to life, is the inevitable portion of those who, themselves unendowed, yet share romantically the pursuits of the inspired. Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius. Suddenly he felt a rush of pity for his companion, whose beautiful faculty of production was thus a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor. Genius was priceless, beneficent, divine, but it was also at its hours capricious, sinister, cruel; and natures ridden by it, accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing passive in the clutch of his temperament. It had shaken him as yet but with a half good-humoured wantonness; but henceforth possibly it meant to handle him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have a short patience.

"When you err you say the fault 's your own," he said at last. "It 's because your faults are your own that I heed them."

Rowland's voice, when he spoke with feeling, had 222