RODERICK HUDSON
Trasteverina whom we might have for a franc an hour! I've been carrying about in my head for years an idea for a creature as fine as a flower-stem and yet as full as a flame, but it has always stayed there for want of a tolerable model. I 've seen my notion in bits, but in her I see it whole. As soon as I looked at her I said to myself, 'By Jove, there 's my idea in the flesh!'"
"What 's the name of your idea?" Roderick asked.
"Don't take it ill," said Gloriani. "You know I'm the very deuce for observation. The name of my idea is the name of the young woman—what was hers?—who pranced up to the king her father with a great bloody head on a great gold tray."
"Salome, daughter of Herodias?"
"Exactly, and of Herod, king of the Jews."
"Do you think Miss Light looks then like a Jewess?"
"No, he only thinks," Rowland interposed, "that Herodias must much have resembled Miss Light — unless indeed he also sees our young woman with your head on her charger."
"Ah," Gloriani laughed, "it is n't a question of Hudson's 'head'!"
If Roderick had taken it ill, this likening of the girl he so admired to the macabre maiden of the Christian story (which resentment was not probable, since we know he thought Gloriani an ass and expected little truth of him), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in the very prostration of homage before both bust and artist. But Roderick's
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