Suddenly he felt an irresistible compassion for his companion;
it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a
double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows
at its possessor. Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was
also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius,
accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was
not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing helpless in
the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half
good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle
him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have
a short patience.
"When you err, you say, the fault 's your own," he said at last. "It is
because your faults are your own that I care about them."
Rowland's voice, when he spoke with feeling, had an extraordinary
amenity. Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he
sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder.
"You are the best man in the world," he said, "and I am a vile brute.
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