At the end of a month, he presented,
mentally, a puzzling spectacle to his companion. He had caught,
instinctively, the key-note of the old world. He observed and enjoyed,
he criticised and rhapsodized, but though all things interested him and
many delighted him, none surprised him; he had divined their logic
and measured their proportions, and referred them infallibly to their
categories. Witnessing the rate at which he did intellectual execution
on the general spectacle of European life, Rowland at moments felt
vaguely uneasy for the future; the boy was living too fast, he would
have said, and giving alarming pledges to ennui in his later years. But
we must live as our pulses are timed, and Roderick's struck the hour
very often. He was, by imagination, though he never became in manner, a
natural man of the world; he had intuitively, as an artist, what one may
call the historic consciousness. He had a relish for social subtleties
and mysteries, and, in perception, when occasion offered him an inch he
never failed to take an ell. A single glimpse of a social situation of
the elder type enabled him to construct the whole, with all its complex
chiaroscuro, and Rowland more than once assured him that he made him
believe in the metempsychosis, and that he must have lived in European
society, in the last century, as a gentleman in a cocked hat and
brocaded waistcoat.
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