RODERICK HUDSON
become dust for the feet and possible malaria for the lungs of future generations—the fact at least remains that one parts half willingly with one's hopes in Rome and misses them only under some very exceptional stress of circumstance. For this reason it may perhaps be said that there is no other place in which one's daily temper has so mellow a serenity, and none at the same time in which acute attacks of depression are more intolerable. Rowland had found in fact a perfect response to his prevision that to live in the lap of the incomparable sorceress was an education to the senses and the imagination; but he sometimes wondered whether this were not a questionable gain in case of one's not being prepared to ask no more of consciousness than they could give. His growing submission to the mere insidious actual, which resembled somehow the presence of an extravagant, flattering visitor, questionably sincere, seemed sometimes to pivot about by a mysterious inward impulse and look his conscience in the face. "But afterwards...?" it brought out with a long interrogative echo; and he could give no answer but a shy affirmation that there was no such thing as to-morrow and that to-day was uncommonly fine. He often felt heavy-hearted; he was sombre without knowing why; there were no visible clouds in his heaven, but there were cloud-shadows on his mood. Shadows projected they often were, without his knowing it, by an undue apprehension that things might after all not go so ideally well with Roderick. When he caught himself fidgeting it vexed him, and he rebuked himself for taking the case unduly hard. If Roderick chose to follow
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