RODERICK HUDSON
Madonna of the Chair seemed in its soft serenity to mock him with the suggestion of unattainable repose. He lingered on the bridges at sunset and knew that the light was enchanting and the mountains divine, but there seemed something horribly invidious and unwelcome in the fact. He felt himself, in a word, a man cruelly defrauded and naturally bent on revenge. Life owed him, he thought, a compensation and he should be restless and resentful till he should find it. He knew—or seemed to know—where he should find it; but he hardly told himself, thinking of it under mental protest, as a man in want of money may think of funds that he holds in trust. In his melancholy meditation the idea of something better than all this, something that might softly, richly interpose, that might reconcile him to the future, that might freshen up a vision of life tainted with staleness—the idea, in fine, of compensation in concrete form found itself remarkably resembling a certain young woman in America, shaped itself sooner or later into the image of Mary Garland.
Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still be brooding over a girl of no brilliancy, of whom he had had a bare glimpse two years before; very odd that an impression should have fixed itself so sharply under so few applications of the die. It is of the very nature of such impressions, however, to show a total never represented by the mere sum of their constituent parts. One night he could n't sleep; his thought was too urgent; it kept him pacing his room. His windows were on the Arno, and as they stood open the noise
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