“Verily! Don’t I look so? Surely I have n’t the same face. Have n’t I a different eye, a different expression, a different voice?”
“I can hardly say, because I have seen the transition. But it ‘s very likely. You are, in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I dare say,” added Rowland, “that Miss Garland would think so.”
“That ‘s not what she would call it; she would say I was corrupted.”
Rowland asked few questions about Miss Garland, but he always listened narrowly to his companion’s voluntary observations.
“Are you very sure?” he replied.
“Why, she ‘s a stern moralist, and she would infer from my appearance that I had become a cynical sybarite.” Roderick had, in fact, a Venetian watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third finger of his left hand.
“Will you think I take a liberty,” asked Rowland, “if I say you judge her superficially?”
“For heaven’s sake,” cried Roderick, laughing, “don’t tell me she ‘s not a moralist! It was for that I fell in love with her, and with rigid virtue in her person.”
“She is a moralist, but not, as you imply, a narrow one. That ‘s more than a difference in degree; it ‘s a difference in kind. I don’t know whether I ever mentioned it, but I admire her extremely. There is nothing narrow about her but her experience; everything else is large. My impression of her is of a person of great capacity, as yet wholly unmeasured and untested. Some day or other, I ‘m sure, she will judge fairly and wisely of everything.”
“Stay a bit!” cried Roderick; “you ‘re a better Catholic than the Pope. I shall be content if she judges fairly of me—of my merits, that is. The rest she must not judge at all. She ‘s a grimly devoted little creature; may she always remain so! Changed as I am, I adore her none the less. What becomes of all our emotions, our impressions,” he went on, after a long pause, “all the material of thought that life pours into us at such a rate during such a memorable three months as these? There are twenty moments a week—a day, for that matter, some days—that seem supreme, twenty impressions that seem ultimate, that appear to form an intellectual era. But others come treading on their heels and sweeping them along, and they all melt like water into water and settle the question of precedence among themselves. The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one’s ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room, and take boarders.”