Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/305

 homage but could hardly be expected to render it. Roderick never acknowledged applause, and apparently failed to follow with any curiosity the footsteps of appreciation. And then his taste as to company was never to be foretold. There were very good fellows who were disposed to cultivate him, but who bored him to crying out, and there were others beyond even the wide bounds of Rowland's charity with whom he appeared to delight to rattle. He gave the most fantastic reasons for his likes and dislikes. He would declare he thirsted for the blood of a man with a flat nose, and he would explain his unaccountable fancy for some competitor wholly featureless by telling you that he had an ancestor who in the thirteenth century had walled up his wife alive.

"I like to talk to a man whose ancestor has walled up his wife alive," he would say. "You may not see the charm of it, and think my poor gentleman a dull dog. It 's very possible; I don't ask you to admire him. But he appeals to me—I mean that fact about him does: it sets him off. The old fellow, the rude forefather, left her for three days with her face exposed, and placed a looking-glass opposite to her, so that she could see, as he said, if her gown was a fit!"

His accessibility to odd association had led him to acquaintance with a number of people outside of Rowland's well-ordered circle, and he made no secret of their being very queer fish. He formed an intimacy, among several, with a strange character who had come to Rome as an emissary of one of the Central American republics, to drive some ecclesiastical bargain with the papal government. 271