“Oh, you claim then that you have made sacrifices?”
“Several! You have never suspected it?”
“If I had, do you suppose I would have allowed it?” cried Roderick.
“They were the sacrifices of friendship and they were easily made; only I don’t enjoy having them thrown back in my teeth.”
This was, under the circumstances, a sufficiently generous speech; but Roderick was not in the humor to take it generously. “Come, be more definite,” he said. “Let me know where it is the shoe has pinched.”
Rowland frowned; if Roderick would not take generosity, he should have full justice. “It ‘s a perpetual sacrifice,” he said, “to live with a perfect egotist.”
“I am an egotist?” cried Roderick.
“Did it never occur to you?”
“An egotist to whom you have made perpetual sacrifices?” He repeated the words in a singular tone; a tone that denoted neither exactly indignation nor incredulity, but (strange as it may seem) a sudden violent curiosity for news about himself.
“You are selfish,” said Rowland; “you think only of yourself and believe only in yourself. You regard other people only as they play into your own hands. You have always been very frank about it, and the thing seemed so mixed up with the temper of your genius and the very structure of your mind, that often one was willing to take the evil with the good and to be thankful that, considering your great talent, you were no worse. But if one believed in you, as I have done, one paid a tax upon it.”