Roderick hesitated a moment. "The way you treated Christina Light. I
call that grossly obtuse."

"Obtuse?" Rowland repeated, frowning.

"Thick-skinned, beneath your good fortune."

"My good fortune?"

"There it is--it 's all news to you! You had pleased her. I don't say
she was dying of love for you, but she took a fancy to you."

"We will let this pass!" said Rowland, after a silence.

"Oh, I don't insist. I have only her own word for it."

"She told you this?"

"You noticed, at least, I suppose, that she was not afraid to speak. I
never repeated it, not because I was jealous, but because I was curious
to see how long your ignorance would last if left to itself."

"I frankly confess it would have lasted forever. And yet I don't
consider that my insensibility is proved."

"Oh, don't say that," cried Roderick, "or I shall begin to suspect--what
I must do you the justice to say that I never have suspected--that you
are a trifle conceited. Upon my word, when I think of all this, your
protest, as you call it, against my following Christina Light seems
to me thoroughly offensive. There is something monstrous in a man's
pretending to lay down the law to a sort of emotion with which he is
quite unacquainted--in his asking a fellow to give up a lovely woman for
conscience' sake, when he has never had the impulse to strike a blow for
one for passion's!"

"Oh, oh!" cried Rowland.

"All that 's very easy to say," Roderick went on; "but you must remember
that there are such things as nerves, and senses, and imagination, and
a restless demon within that may sleep sometimes for a day, or for six
months, but that sooner or later wakes up and thumps at your ribs till
you listen to him! If you can't understand it, take it on trust, and let
a poor imaginative devil live his life as he can!"

Roderick's words seemed at first to Rowland like something heard in a
dream; it was impossible they had been actually spoken--so supreme an
expression were they of the insolence of egotism. Reality was never so
consistent as that! But Roderick sat there balancing his beautiful
head, and the echoes of his strident accent still lingered along the
half-muffled mountain-side. Rowland suddenly felt that the cup of his
chagrin was full to overflowing, and his long-gathered bitterness surged
into the simple, wholesome passion of anger for wasted kindness. But
he spoke without violence, and Roderick was probably at first far from
measuring