RODERICK HUDSON
dried up within him, and there was no household magic, no waving of any blest wand, to make it flow again. He was rarely violent, he expressed little of the irritation and ennui he must have constantly felt; it was as if he believed that an inward miracle—but only a miracle—might yet take place for him and was perhaps worth waiting for. The most that one could do, however, was to wait grimly and doggedly, suppressing an imprecation as from time to time one looked at one's watch. An attitude of positive urbanity towards life was not to be expected; it was doing one's duty to hold one's tongue and keep one's hands off one's own windpipe and other people's. He had long sad silences, fits of a deeper detachment than any before, during which he sat in the garden by the hour, with his head thrown back, his legs outstretched, his hands in his pockets and his eyes attached to the blinding summer sky. He would gather a dozen books about him, tumble them out on the ground, take one into his lap and leave it with the pages unturned. These moods would alternate with attacks of high restlessness, when, at unnatural hours, he made unexplained absences. He bore the heat of the Italian summer like a salamander and used to start off in the glare of noon for long walks over the hills. He often went down into Florence, rambled through the close dim streets and lounged away mornings in the churches and galleries. On several of these occasions Rowland bore him company, for they were the times when his contact had most of its early charm. Before Michael Angelo's statues and the pictures of the early Tuscans he quite forgot his disaster and
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