Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/518

 great logs. Even with Roderick hovering moodily apart they made a sympathetic little circle, and they turned over Singleton's drawings while he perched in the chimney-corner, blushing and explaining, with his feet on the rounds of his chair. He had been pedestrianising for six weeks, and he was glad to rest a while at Engelthal. It was no empty interval, however, for he sallied forth every morning, his utensils on his back, in search of material for new studies. Roderick's ironic sense of him, after the first evening, had spent itself, and he might have been listening, as under a sombre spell, to the hum of some prosperous workshop from which he had been discharged for incompetence. Singleton, who was not in the secret of his personal misfortunes, still treated him, with romantic reverence, as the rising star of American art. Roderick had said to Rowland at first that their friend reminded him of some curious insect with a remarkable mechanical instinct in its antennae; but as the days went by it was apparent that the modest landscapist's successful method grew to have an oppressive meaning for him. It pointed a moral, and Roderick used to sit and con the moral as he saw it figured in the little painter's bent back, on the hot hillsides, protruding from beneath a white umbrella. One day he wandered up a long slope and overtook him as he sat at work; Singleton related the incident afterwards to Rowland, who, since giving him in Rome a hint of the other's aberrations, had strictly kept his own counsel.

"Are you always just like this?" Roderick had asked in almost sepulchral accents. 484