Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/262

 other times he restlessly talked, though in a fitful, musing monologue. Rowland could have felt it his duty at moments to offer to feel his pulse; he wondered if he had n't symptoms of fever. Roderick had taken a great fancy to Villa Mondragone, and used to pay it florid compliments as they strolled, in the winter sunshine, on the great terrace which looks toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine hills. He carried his volume of Ariosto in his pocket and took it out every now and then to spout passages to his companion. He was as a general thing very little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the classics and nose over it as for the flowers. He had picked up Italian without study, and gave it a wonderful sound, though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half his admirations and felicities. Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of his craft; a sculptor should above all make a companion of Dante. So he gave him a fine old copy of the Inferno, a high rarity, one of his portable treasures, and advised him to make it familiar. Roderick took it responsively—perhaps he should find it tonic; but he had renounced it the next day: he had found it horribly depressing.

"A sculptor should model as Dante writes—you're right there," he said. "But when his genius is in eclipse Dante 's a dreadfully smoky lamp. By what perversity of fate," he went on, "has it come about that I find myself a sculptor at all? A sculptor 's such a confoundedly special genius; there are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that 228