"If I
had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you."
Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle
into the clay. "Say it outright! You have been a great fool to believe
in me."
"I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don't honestly believe I
do!" said Rowland. "It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to
reply to such nonsense."
Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.
Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he
had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled
character--his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal
attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile
petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that,
on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from
having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever,
that all this was but the painful complexity of genius. Rowland, who
had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested
reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous
theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of
genius.
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