RODERICK HUDSON
him in the early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination of horticultural odours. A rosy widow of twenty-eight, half-cousin, half-hostess, doing the honours of a fragrant cottage on a midsummer evening, was a phenomenon to which all the young man's senses were able to rise. Cecilia was always gracious, but this evening she was positively in spirits. She was in a happy mood, and Mallet imagined there was a private reason for it—a reason quite distinct from her pleasure in receiving her honoured kinsman. The next day he flattered himself he was on the way to discover it.
For the present, after tea, as they sat on the rose-framed porch, while Rowland held his younger cousin between his knees, and she, enjoying her situation, listened timorously for the stroke of bedtime, Cecilia insisted on talking more about her visitor than about herself. "What is it you mean to do in Europe?" she asked lightly, giving a turn to the frill of her sleeve—just such a turn as seemed to Mallet to bring out all the latent difficulties of the question.
"Why, very much what I do here," he answered. "No great harm!"
"Is it true," Cecilia asked, "that here you do no great harm? Is n't a man like you doing a certain harm when he is n't doing some positive good?"
"Is n't that compliment rather ambiguous?" he inquired in return.
"No," she answered, "you know what I think of you. You have a turn for doing nice things and behaving yourself properly. You have it, in the first
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