Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/104

 them. It must be confessed, however, that if the response was vague, the satisfaction he drew from her mere colourless patience was great, and that after his second visit he kept seeing the element itself reflected in the most unlikely surfaces, the most unexpected places. It seemed strange that she should interest him so much at so slender a cost; but interest him she did, extraordinarily, and his interest had a quality altogether new to him. It made him restless and a trifle melancholy; he walked about absently, wondering and wishing. He wondered, among other things, why fate should have condemned him to make the acquaintance of a girl whom he would make a sacrifice to know better, just as he was leaving the country for years. It seemed to him that he was turning his back on a chance of happiness—happiness of a sort of which the slenderest germ should be cultivated. He asked himself whether, feeling as he did, if he had only himself to please, he would have given up his start and hung about. He had Roderick to please now, for whom disappointment would be cruel; but he took it for presumable that had there been no Roderick in the case the ship would be sailing without him. He asked the young man several questions about his cousin, but Roderick, throwing discretion to the winds on so many points, seemed to have reasons of his own for being reticent on this one. His measured answers quickened Rowland's curiosity, for the girl, with her irritating half-suggestions, had only to be a subject of guarded allusion in others to become a secret obsession. He learned from Roderick 70