"Here is an uncommonly fine thing," he said to himself: "a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of--knocks the bottom out of pride!" His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in his companion's whole personality that overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an instant faltered.

He listened to Roderick's last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled--with bitterness.
"I don't at all like your telling me I am too zealous," he said.

"If I had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you." Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle into the clay.

"Say it outright! You have been a great fool to believe in me." "I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don't honestly believe I do!" said Rowland.

"It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense." Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.
Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled character--his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance.