ther people's works, for a month--not even at Nature's own. I want to
look at Roderick Hudson's. The result of it all is that I 'm not afraid.
I can but try, as well as the rest of them! The fellow who did that
gazing goddess yonder only made an experiment. The other day, when I
was looking at Michael Angelo's Moses, I was seized with a kind
of defiance--a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of
grandeur. It was a rousing great success, certainly, that rose there
before me, but somehow it was not an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed
to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as well, but that at least
I might!"

"As you say, you can but try," said Rowland. "Success is only passionate
effort."

"Well, the passion is blazing; we have been piling on fuel handsomely.
It came over me just now that it is exactly three months to a day since
I left Northampton. I can't believe it!"

"It certainly seems more."

"It seems like ten years. What an exquisite ass I was!"

"Do you feel so wise now?"

"Verily! Don't I look so? Surely I have n't the same face. Have n't I a
different eye, a different expression, a different voice?"

"I can hardly say, because I have seen the transition. But it 's very
likely. You are, in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I
dare say," added Rowland, "that Miss Garland would think so."

"That 's not what she would call it; she would say I was corrupted."

Rowland asked few questions about Miss Garland, but he always listened
narrowly to his companion's voluntary observations.

"Are you very sure?" he replied.

"Why, she 's a stern moralist, and she would infer from my appearance
that I had become a cynical sybarite." Roderick had, in fact, a Venetian
watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third
finger of his left hand.

"Will you think I take a liberty," asked Rowland, "if I say you judge
her superficially?"

"For heaven's sake," cried Roderick, laughing, "don't tell me she 's
not a moralist! It was for that I fell in love with her, and with rigid
virtue in her person."

"She is a moralist, but not, as you imply, a narrow one. That 's more
than a difference in degree; it 's a difference in kind. I don't know
whether I ever mentioned it, but I admire her extremely. There is
nothing narrow about her but her experience; everything else is large.
My impression of her is of a person of great capacity, as yet wholly
unmeasured and untested