RODERICK HUDSON
conviction must have been largely grounded in a tacit comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to mark with the seal of prospective possession a woman at whose disposition he himself had been keeping, from the moment of his first meeting her, a secret fund of strange alacrities. That if Rowland Mallet happened to be very much struck with the merits of Roderick's mistress the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case to which our virtuous hero did scanty justice. There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a little—women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily interesting. Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the terror or the hunger, of a lover. There were other women—they might have great beauty, they might have small; their discussable beauty was not what had most to do with it—whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent. Such a one conspicuously was Mary Garland. By the law of probabilities it had been unlikely she should exert the same charm for each of them, and was it not possible therefore that the charm for Roderick had been simply the circumstance of sex, the accident of nearness, the influence of youth, sympathy, kindness—of the present feminine in short—enhanced indeed by the advantage of an expressive countenance? The charm for Rowland, on the other hand, by this
176
