Chapter 6 - Page 2

"You must do me justice. I am the cause of your separation from Miss
Garland, the cause of your being exposed to temptations which she hardly
even suspects. How could I ever face her," Rowland demanded, with much
warmth of tone, "if at the end of it all she should be unhappy?"

"I had no idea that Miss Garland had made such an impression on you.
You are too zealous; I take it she did n't charge you to look after her
interests."

"If anything happens to you, I am accountable. You must understand
that."

"That 's a view of the situation I can't accept; in your own interest,
no less than in mine. It can only make us both very uncomfortable. I
know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that! But I am not a small boy
nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes
open. When I do well, the merit 's mine; if I do ill, the fault 's mine!
The idea that I make you nervous is detestable. Dedicate your nerves
to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a
quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves."

Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly
his brilliant young friend was without a conscience; now it dimly
occurred to him that he was without a heart. 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. "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