One morning, as the two young men were lounging on the sun-warmed grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa Mondragone, Roderick delivered himself of a tissue of lugubrious speculations as to the possible mischances of one’s genius. “What if the watch should run down,” he asked, “and you should lose the key? What if you should wake up some morning and find it stopped, inexorably, appallingly stopped? Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have had to grin and bear it. The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism. If it gets out of order we can’t mend it; if it breaks down altogether we can’t set it going again. We must let it choose its own pace, and hold our breath lest it should lose its balance. It ‘s dealt out in different doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion it ‘s as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more porridge. Lucky for you if you ‘ve got one of the big cups; we drink them down in the dark, and we can’t tell their size until we tip them up and hear the last gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of others for a couple of years. Nay, what are you smiling at so damnably?” he went on. “Nothing is more common than for an artist who has set out on his journey on a high-stepping horse to find himself all of a sudden dismounted and invited to go his way on foot. You can number them by the thousand--the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose candle burnt out in a night. Some of them groped their way along without it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the wayside to beg. Who shall say that I ‘m not one of these? Who shall assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum? Nothing proves it, and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of shaking off the dust of Northampton. If you believed so, my dear fellow, you did so at your own risk! What am I, what are the best of us, but an experiment? Do I succeed--do I fail? It does n’t depend on me. I ‘m prepared for failure. It won’t be a disappointment, simply because I shan’t survive it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game. I ‘m not making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won’t add insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble. But I have a conviction that if the hour strikes here,” and he tapped his forehead, “I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud! For the past ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming before my eyes. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!”