Roderick had
changed his sky, but he had not changed his mind; his humor was still
that of which he had given Rowland a glimpse in that tragic explosion on
the Lake of Como. He kept his despair to himself, and he went doggedly
about the ordinary business of life; but it was easy to see that his
spirit was mortally heavy, and that he lived and moved and talked simply
from the force of habit. In that sad half-hour among the Italian olives
there had been such a fierce sincerity in his tone, that Rowland
began to abdicate the critical attitude. He began to feel that it was
essentially vain to appeal to the poor fellow's will; there was no will
left; its place was an impotent void. This view of the case indeed was
occasionally contravened by certain indications on Roderick's part of
the power of resistance to disagreeable obligations: one might still
have said, if one had been disposed to be didactic at any hazard,
that there was a method in his madness, that his moral energy had its
sleeping and its waking hours, and that, in a cause that pleased it, it
was capable of rising with the dawn.
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