I feel wretchedly like a swindler.  If his working mood came but once in five years I would willingly wait for it and maintain him in leisure, if need be, in the intervals; but that would be a sorry account to present to them.  Five years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the question.  I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan!  He ’s too confoundedly all of one piece; he won’t throw overboard a grain of the cargo to save the rest.  Fancy him thus with all his brilliant personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a nervous nineteenth-century Apollo, and you will understand that there is mighty little comfort in seeing him in a bad way.  He was tolerably foolish last summer at Baden Baden, but he got on his feet, and for a while he was steady.  Then he began to waver again, and at last toppled over.  Now, literally, he ’s lying prone.  He came into my room last night, miserably tipsy.  I assure you, it did n’t amuse me.....  About Miss Light it ’s a long story.  She is one of the great beauties of all time, and worth coming barefoot to Rome, like the pilgrims of old, to see.  Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman.  And you may take this for truth, because I ’m not in love with her.  On the contrary!  Her education has been simply infernal.  She is corrupt, perverse, as proud as the queen of Sheba, and an appalling coquette; but she is generous, and with patience and skill you may enlist her imagination in a good cause as well as in a bad one.  The other day I tried to manipulate it a little.  Chance offered me an interview to which it was possible to give a serious turn, and I boldly broke ground and begged her to suffer my poor friend to go in peace.  After a good deal of finessing she consented, and the next day, with a single word, packed him off to Naples to drown his sorrow in debauchery.  I have come to the conclusion that she is more dangerous in her virtuous moods than in her vicious ones, and that she probably has a way of turning her back which is the most provoking thing in the world.  She ’s an actress, she could n’t forego doing the thing dramatically, and it was the dramatic touch that made it fatal.  I wished her, of course, to let him down easily; but she desired to have the curtain drop on an attitude, and her attitudes deprive inflammable young artists of their reason.....  Roderick made an admirable bust of her at the beginning of the winter, and a dozen women came rushing to him to be done, mutatis mutandis, in the same style.  They were all great ladies and ready to take him by the hand, but he told them all their faces did n’t interest him, and sent them away vowing his destruction.”

At this point of his long effusion, Rowland had paused and put by his letter.  He kept it three days and then read it over.  He was disposed at first to destroy it, but he decided finally to keep it, in the hope that it might strike a spark of useful suggestion from the flint of Cecilia’s good sense.  We know he had a talent for taking advice.  And then it might be, he reflected, that his cousin’s answer would throw some light on Mary Garland’s present vision of things.  In his altered mood he added these few lines:—­