will make you swoon!'
'So that when we come and see you,' said Madame Grandoni, 'we must be sure and bring our smelling-bottles. And pray have a few soft sofas conveniently placed.'
'Phidias and Praxiteles,' Miss Blanchard remarked, 'had the advantage of believing in their goddesses. I insist on believing, for myself, that the pagan mythology is not a fiction, and that Venus and Juno and Apollo and Mercury used to come down in a cloud into this very city of Rome where we sit talking nineteenth century English.'
'Nineteenth century nonsense, my dear!' cried Madame Grandoni. 'Mr. Hudson may be a new Phidias, but Venus and Juno—that 's you and I—arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver, too.'
'But, my dear fellow,' objected Gloriani, 'you don't mean to say you are going to make over in cold blood those poor old exploded Apollos and Hebes.'
'It won't matter what you call them,' said Roderick. 'They shall be simply divine forms. They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring. That 's all the Greek divinities were.'
'That 's rather abstract, you know,' said Miss Blanchard.
'My dear fellow,' cried Gloriani, 'you 're delightfully young.'
'I hope you 'll not grow any older,' said Singleton, with a flush of sympathy across his large white forehead. 'You can do it if you try.'
'Then there are all the Forces and Mysteries and Elements of Nature,' Roderick went on. 'I mean to do the Morning; I mean to do the Night! I mean to do the Ocean and the Mountains; the Moon and the West Wind. I mean to make a magnificent statue of America!'
'America—the Mountains—the Moon!' said Gloriani. 'You 'll find it rather hard, I 'm afraid, to compress such subjects into classic forms.'
'Oh, there 's a way,' cried Roderick, 'and I shall think it out. My figures shall make no contortions, but they shall mean a tremendous deal.'
'I 'm sure there are contortions enough in Michael Angelo,' said Madame Grandoni. 'Perhaps you don't approve of him.'
'Oh, Michael Angelo was not me!' said Roderick, with sublimity. There was a great laugh; but after all, Roderick had done some fine things.
Rowland had bidden one of the servants bring him a small portfolio of prints, and had taken out a photograph of Roderick's little statue of the youth drinking. It pleased him to see his friend sitting there in radiant ardor, defending idealism against so knowing an apostle of corruption as Gloriani, and he wished to help the elder artist to be confuted. He silently handed him the photograph.
'Bless me!' cried Gloriani, 'did he do this?'
'Ages ago,' said Roderick.
Gloriani looked at the photograph a long time, with evident admiration.
'It 's deucedly pretty,' he said at last. 'But, my dear young friend, you can't keep this up.'
'I shall do better,' said Roderick.
'You will do worse! You will become weak. You will have to take to violence, to contortions, to romanticism, in self-defense. This sort of thing is like a man trying to lift himself up by the seat of his trousers. He may stand on tiptoe, but he can't do more. Here you stand on tiptoe, very gracefully, I admit; but you can't fly; there 's no use trying.'
'My 'America' shall answer you!' said Roderick, shaking toward him a tall glass of champagne and drinking it down.
Singleton had taken the photograph and was poring over it with a little murmur of delight.
'Was this done in America?' he asked.
'In a square white wooden house at Northampton, Massachusetts,' Roderick answered.
'Dear old white wooden houses!' said Miss Blanchard.
'If you could do as well as this there,' said Singleton, blushing and smiling, 'one might say that really you had only to lose by coming to Rome.'
'Mallet is to blame for that,' said Roderick. 'But I am willing to risk the loss.'
The photograph had been passed to Madame Grandoni. 'It reminds me,' she said, 'of the things a young man used to do whom I knew years ago, when I first came to Rome. He was a German, a pupil of Overbeck and a votary of spiritual art. He used to wear a black velvet tunic and a very low shirt collar; he had a neck like a sickly crane, and let his hair grow down to his shoulders. His name was Herr Schafgans. He never painted anything so profane as a man taking a drink, but his figures were all of the simple and slender and angular pattern, and nothing if not innocent—like this one of yours. He would not have agreed with Gloriani any more than you. He used to come and see me very often, and in those days I thought his tunic and his long neck infallible symptoms of genius. His talk was all of gilded aureoles and beatific visions; he lived on weak wine and biscuits, and wore a lock of Saint Somebody's hair in a little bag round his neck. If he was not a Beato Angelico, it was not his own fault. I hope with all my heart that Mr. Hudson will do the fine things he talks about, but he must bear in mind the history of dear Mr. Schafgans as a warning against high-flown pretensions. One fine day this poor young man fell in love with a Roman model, though she had never sat to him, I believe, for she was a buxom, bold-faced, high-colored creature, and he painted none but pale, sickly women. He offered to marry her, and she looked at him from head to foot, gave a shrug, and consented. But he was ashamed to set up his menage in Rome. They went to Naples, and there, a couple of years afterwards, I saw him. The poor fellow was ruined. His wife used to beat him, and he had taken to drinking. He wore a ragged black coat, and he had a blotchy, red face. Madame had turned washerwoman and used to make him go and fetch the dirty linen. His talent had gone heaven knows where! He was getting his living by painting views of Vesuvius in eruption on the little boxes they sell at Sorrento.'
'Moral: don't fall in love with a buxom Roman model,' said Roderick. 'I 'm much obliged to you for your story, but I don't mean to fall in love with any one.'
