RODERICK HUDSON
reassure you; I 've too many doubts myself about everything in this weary world. You 've 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 've said before—that all modern sculpture seems to me vulgar, 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 'm duly sensible—that at times you feel terribly scant, why, I can only answer, 'Ah then, my poor friend, I 'm afraid you are scant!' The language I should like to hear from a person offering me his career is that of a confidence that would knock me down."
Roderick raised his head, but said nothing; he seemed to be making with his companion some long, deep, dumb exchange. The result of it was that he flung himself back at last with an incoherent wail. Rowland, admonished by the silence, had been on the point of turning away, but was arrested by a sudden gesture on Christina's part. She pointed a moment into the blue air, and 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,
263
