esco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used
to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies
and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same
quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at
home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in
Rowland's more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches
and gardens.

Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace not far
from the Fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and
pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air
of leisurely permanence. He had the tastes of a collector; he spent half
his afternoons ransacking the dusty magazines of the curiosity-mongers,
and often made his way, in quest of a prize, into the heart of
impecunious Roman households, which had been prevailed upon to
listen--with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile--to proposals
for an hereditary "antique." In the evening, often, under the lamp,
amid dropped curtains and the scattered gleam of firelight upon polished
carvings and mellow paintings, the two friends sat with their heads
together, criticising intaglios and etchings, water-color drawings and
illuminated missals. Roderick's quick appreciation of every form of
artistic beauty reminded his companion of the flexible temperament of
those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently
painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engravers. At times when he saw
how the young sculptor's day passed in a single sustained pulsation,
while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of
the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half suppressed, some of them,
for conscience' sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in
possession--he felt a pang of something akin to envy. But Rowland had
two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment: he
was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rider. He plunged into bulky
German octavos on Italian history, and he spent long afternoons in
the saddle, ranging over the grassy desolation of the Campagna. As the
season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves, he
found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy opportunity
for knowing others. He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside
an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself
soci