Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/506

 method in his madness, that his moral energy had its sleeping and its waking hours, and that in an attractive cause it would yet again be capable of rising with the dawn. This name, however, for a possible knock at his door, what was it, truly, but another word for an inspiration? Oh, for such a visitor, the appealing plastic idea, he would spring up and open wide his eyes and look out at the dawn; but where was the precious pebble to come from that might be cast with the right sharp tap at his window-pane? It was now impossible, at all events, not to be indulgent to a consciousness that had so ceased to be aggressive—not to forgive much apathy to a temper that had turned its rough side inward. Roderick said frankly that Switzerland made him less miserable than Italy, and that the Alps were less of a reproach to idle skilled hands than the Apennines. He went in for long rambles, generally alone, and was very fond of climbing into dizzy places where no sound could overtake him and there, stretched at his length on the never-trodden moss, of pulling his hat over his eyes and lounging away the hours in perfect immobility. Rowland was sometimes the associate of these walks, for if his friend never directly proposed it he yet as little visibly resented it; and the only way at present to treat him was as a graceful, an almost genial, a certainly harmless eccentric, with whom one assumed that all things were well and held one's tongue about the prosperity he had forfeited, or maintained to any questioner—much rejoicing, for the time, there were none—that such were the interlunar swoons of the true as distinguished from the false artist, and that the style 472