He had been an ass, but it was not irreparable; he could make another statue in a couple of months.
Rowland frowned.

"For heaven's sake," he said, "don't play such dangerous games with your facility.

If you have got facility, revere it, respect it, adore it, treasure it--don't speculate on it." And he wondered what his companion, up to his knees in debt, would have done if there had been no good-natured Rowland Mallet to lend a helping hand.
But he did not formulate his curiosity audibly, and the contingency seemed not to have presented itself to Roderick's imagination.

The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is; more as if they had been the adventures of another person.

He related half a dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this free discussion, he laughed extravagantly at the memory of them.