[Roderick Hudson by Henry James]@TWC D-Link book
Roderick Hudson

CHAPTER III
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He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such observances is to take them with exaggerated gravity.

He introduced Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself--an enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient capacity.

Wherever he went he made, not exactly what is called a favorable impression, but what, from a practical point of view, is better--a puzzling one.

He took to evening parties as a duck to water, and before the winter was half over was the most freely and frequently discussed young man in the heterogeneous foreign colony.

Rowland's theory of his own duty was to let him run his course and play his cards, only holding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls, and administer a friendly propulsion through tight places.


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