Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/261

 reserving for himself the detriment. Nothing happened, however, to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick's secondary impulses were the prompt saving ones, and that his nature as a mixed whole tasted distinctly more of its sweet than of its bitter parts. The wind had dropped, at all events, for the time, round the young man's head, even if the cloud had not lifted; he was lazy, listless and detached, but he had never been so softly submissive. Winter had begun by the calendar, yet the weather was divinely mild, and the companions took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged away the mornings in the villas. The villas at Frascati make infinitely for peace and are rich in the romantic note. Roderick, as he had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his meditations Rowland could hold his breath for it with the best will in the world. But Roderick let him know from the first that he was in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr. Leavenworth.

"It 's worse out here than in Rome," he said, "for here I'm face to face with the dead blank of my mind. There I could n't think of anything either, but there I found things that helped me to live without thought." This was as free a renewed tribute to forbidden fruit as could have hoped to pass; it seemed indeed to Rowland surprisingly free—a lively instance of his friend's disassociated manner of looking, as might have been said, at the time of day. Roderick was silent sometimes for hours, with a vague anxiety in his face and a new fold between his even eyebrows; at 227