Rowland, as we have already
intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had
gone forth into his relations with Roderick. There had been, from the
first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had
implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick
had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it. Rowland, indeed, had taken
an exquisite satisfaction in his companion's deep, inexpressive assent
to his interest in him. "Here is an uncommonly fine thing," he said to
himself: "a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does
the thing that love alone generally has the credit of--knocks the bottom
out of pride!" His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had
indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection,
his sense of something in his companion's whole personality that
overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an
instant faltered. He listened to Roderick's last words, and then he
smiled as he rarely smiled--with bitterness.
"I don't at all like your telling me I am too zealous," he said.
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