As the
season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves, he
found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy opportunity
for knowing others. He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside
an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself
society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted
invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that
the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such
observances is to take them with exaggerated gravity. He introduced
Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself--an
enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient
capacity. Wherever he went he made, not exactly what is called a
favorable impression, but what, from a practical point of view, is
better--a puzzling one. He took to evening parties as a duck to water,
and before the winter was half over was the most freely and frequently
discussed young man in the heterogeneous foreign colony. Rowland's
theory of his own duty was to let him run his course and play his
cards, only holding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls,
and administer a friendly propulsion through tight places.
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