hat kind ever amuses me to the end: before it 's
half over it bores me to death; it makes me sick. Hang it, why can't a
poor fellow enjoy things in peace? My illusions are all broken-winded;
they won't carry me twenty paces! I can't laugh and forget; my
laugh dies away before it begins. Your friend Stendhal writes on his
book-covers (I never got farther) that he has seen too early in life la
beaute parfaite. I don't know how early he saw it; I saw it before I was
born--in another state of being! I can't describe it positively; I can
only say I don't find it anywhere now. Not at the bottom of champagne
glasses; not, strange as it may seem, in that extra half-yard or so of
shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose. I
don't find it at merry supper-tables, where half a dozen ugly men with
pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; not
when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets, and go
out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there
like gnawed bones stuck into the earth. Everything is mean and dusky
and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant
society are the meanest and shabbiest of all. They have no real
spontaneity; they are all cowards and popinjays. They have no more
dignity than so many grasshoppers. Nothing is good but one!" And he
jumped up and stood looking at one of his statues, which shone vaguely
across the room in the dim lamplight.

"Yes, do tell us," said Rowland, "what to hold on by!"

"Those things of mine were tolerably good," he answered. "But my idea
was better--and that 's what I mean!"

Rowland said nothing. He was willing to wait for Roderick to complete
the circle of his metamorphoses, but he had no desire to officiate as
chorus to the play. If Roderick chose to fish in troubled waters, he
must land his prizes himself.

"You think I 'm an impudent humbug," the latter said at last, "coming
up to moralize at this hour of the night. You think I want to throw
dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent. That 's your eminently
rational view of the case."

"Excuse me from taking any view at all," said Rowland.

"You have given me up, then?"

"No, I have merely suspended judgment. I am waiting."

"You have ceased then positively to believe in me?"

Rowland made an angry gesture. "Oh, cruel boy! When you have hit your
mark and made people care for you, you should n't twist your wea