equivalent to the signature—Roderick Hudson. A moment's reflection, hereupon, satisfied him of the identity of the lady. He had been unjust to poor Assunta, sitting patient in the gloomy arena; she had not come on her own errand. Rowland's discoveries made him hesitate. Should he retire as noiselessly as possible, or should he call out a friendly good morning? While he was debating the question, he found himself distinctly hearing his friends' words. They were of such a nature as to make him unwilling to retreat, and yet to make it awkward to be discovered in a position where it would be apparent that he had heard them.
'If what you say is true,' said Christina, with her usual soft deliberateness—it made her words rise with peculiar distinctness to Rowland's ear—'you are simply weak. I am sorry! I hoped—I really believed—you were not.'
'No, I am not weak,' answered Roderick, with vehemence; 'I maintain that I am not weak! I am incomplete, perhaps; but I can't help that. Weakness is a man's own fault!'
'Incomplete, then!' said Christina, with a laugh. 'It 's the same thing, so long as it keeps you from splendid achievement. Is it written, then, that I shall really never know what I have so often dreamed of?'
'What have you dreamed of?'
'A man whom I can perfectly respect!' cried the young girl, with a sudden flame. 'A man, at least, whom I can unrestrictedly admire. I meet one, as I have met more than one before, whom I fondly believe to be cast in a larger mould than most of the vile human breed, to be large in character, great in talent, strong in will! In such a man as that, I say, one's weary imagination at last may rest; or it may wander if it will, yet never need to wander far from the deeps where one's heart is anchored. When I first knew you, I gave no sign, but you had struck me. I observed you, as women observe, and I fancied you had the sacred fire.'
'Before heaven, I believe I have!' cried Roderick.
'Ah, but so little! It flickers and trembles and sputters; it goes out, you tell me, for whole weeks together. From your own account, it 's ten to one that in the long run you 're a failure.'
'I say those things sometimes myself, but when I hear you say them they make me feel as if I could work twenty years at a sitting, on purpose to refute you!'
'Ah, the man who is strong with what I call strength,' Christina replied, 'would neither rise nor fall by anything I could say! I am a poor, weak woman; I have no strength myself, and I can give no strength. I am a miserable medley of vanity and folly. I am silly, I am ignorant, I am affected, I am false. I am the fruit of a horrible education, sown on a worthless soil. I am all that, and yet I believe I have one merit! I should know a great character when I saw it, and I should delight in it with a generosity which would do something toward the remission of my sins. For a man who should really give me a certain feeling—which I have never had, but which I should know when it came—I would send Prince Casamassima and his millions to perdition. I don't know what you think of me for saying all this; I suppose we have not climbed up here under the skies to play propriety. Why have you been at such pains to assure me, after all, that you are a little man and not a great one, a weak one and not a strong? I innocently imagined that your eyes declared you were strong. But your voice condemns you; I always wondered at it; it 's not the voice of a conqueror!'
'Give me something to conquer,' cried Roderick, 'and when I say that I thank you from my soul, my voice, whatever you think of it, shall speak the truth!'
Christina for a moment said nothing. Rowland was too interested to think of moving. 'You pretend to such devotion,' she went on, 'and yet I am sure you have never really chosen between me and that person in America.'
'Do me the favor not to speak of her,' said Roderick, imploringly.
'Why not? I say no ill of her, and I think all kinds of good. I am certain she is a far better girl than I, and far more likely to make you happy.'
'This is happiness, this present, palpable moment,' said Roderick; 'though you have such a genius for saying the things that torture me!'
'It 's greater happiness than you deserve, then! You have never chosen, I say; you have been afraid to choose. You have never really faced the fact that you are false, that you have broken your faith. You have never looked at it and seen that it was hideous, and yet said, 'No matter, I 'll brave the penalty, I 'll bear the shame!' You have closed your eyes; you have tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were not behaving as badly as you seemed to be, and there would be some way, after all, of compassing bliss and yet escaping trouble. You have faltered and drifted, you have gone on from accident to accident, and I am sure that at this present moment you can't tell what it is you really desire!'
Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent, and his hands clapsed around his legs. He bent his head and rested his forehead on his knees.
Christina went on with a sort of infernal calmness: 'I believe that, really, you don't greatly care for your friend in America any more than you do for me. You are one of the men who care only for themselves and for what they can make of themselves. That 's very well when they can make something great, and I could interest myself in a man of extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his passions to account. But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary? Fancy feeling one's self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent! If you have doubts about yourself, I can't reassure you; I have too many doubts myself, about everything in this weary world. You have gone up like a rocket, in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come down like the stick? I don't pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I have said before—that all modern sculpture seems to me weak, and that the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques of the Vatican. No, no, I can't reassure you; and when you tell me—with a confidence in my discretion of which, certainly, I am duly sensible—that at times you feel terribly small, why, I can only answer, 'Ah, then, my poor friend, I am afraid you are small.' The language I should like to hear, from a certain person, would be the language of absolute decision.'
Roderick raised his head, but he said nothing; he seemed to be exchanging a long glance with his companion. The result of it was to make him fling himself back with an inarticulate murmur. Rowland, admonished by the silence, was on the point of turning away, but he was arrested by a gesture of the young girl. She pointed for a moment into the blue air. Roderick followed the direction of her gesture.
'Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche,' she asked, 'as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?' She spoke apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a less painful channel.
Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant—a delicate plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment of wall some twenty feet from Christina's place.
Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering. At last, glancing round, 'Put up your veil!' he said. Christina complied. 'Does it look as blue now?' he asked.
