e kind, and you don't honestly believe I
do!" said Rowland. "It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to
reply to such nonsense."

Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.
Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he
had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled
character--his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal
attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile
petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that,
on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from
having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever,
that all this was but the painful complexity of genius. Rowland, who
had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested
reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous
theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of
genius. Suddenly he felt an irresistible compassion for his companion;
it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a
double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows
at its possessor. Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was
also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius,
accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was
not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing helpless in
the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half
good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle
him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have
a short patience.

"When you err, you say, the fault 's your own," he said at last. "It is
because your faults are your own that I care about them."

Rowland's voice, when he spoke with feeling, had an extraordinary
amenity. Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he
sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder.
"You are the best man in the world," he said, "and I am a vile brute.
Only," he added in a moment, "you don't understand me!" And he looked
at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and
Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one's own
grossness if one failed to read to the bottom of that beautiful soul.

Rowland smiled sadly. "What is it now? Explain."

"Oh, I can't explain!" crie