RODERICK HUDSON
she gave him an appealing glance and a timorous "Really?"
But before her visitor could respond Mr. Striker again intervened. "Do I fully apprehend your expression?" he asked. "Our young friend is to become one of our great men?"
"One of our great artists, I hope. Perhaps greater than any."
"This is a new and interesting view," said Mr. Striker with an assumption of judicial calmness. "We 've had hopes for Mr. Roderick, but I confess that if I 've rightly understood them they stopped short of towering eminence. We shouldn't have taken the responsibility of entertaining that idea for him. What do you say, ladies? We all feel about him here—his mother, Miss Garland and myself—as if his merits were rather in the line of the"—and Mr. Striker waved his hand with a series of fantastic flourishes in the air—"of the light ornamental." Mr. Striker bore his recalcitrant pupil a grudge; yet he was evidently trying both to be fair and to respect the susceptibilities of his companions. He was still unversed in the mysterious processes of feminine emotion. Ten minutes before there had been a general harmony of sombre views; but on hearing Roderick's limitations thus distinctly formulated to a stranger the two ladies mutely protested. Mrs. Hudson uttered a short faint sigh, and Miss Garland raised her eyes toward their advocate and visited him with a short cold glance.
"I 'm afraid, Mrs. Hudson," Rowland pursued, evading the question of the ultimate future, "that
56
