Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/168

 It is a question if the reader will know why, but this letter gave Rowland extraordinary pleasure. He liked its shortness, almost its dryness, and there seemed to him an exquisite modesty in its saying nothing from the girl herself. He delighted in the formal address and conclusion; they pleased him as he had been pleased by the angular gesture of some maiden-saint in a primitive painting. The whole thing quickened that impression of fine feeling combined with an almost rigid simplicity which Roderick's betrothed had personally given him. Its homely stiffness showed as the direct reflexion of a life concentrated, as the writer had borrowed warrant from her companion to say, in a single devoted idea. The monotonous days of the two women seemed to Rowland's fancy to follow each other like the tick-tick of a great time-piece marking off the hours which separated them from the supreme felicity of clasping the far-away son and lover to lips sealed with the intensity of joy.

He was left to vain conjectures, however, as to Roderick's own state of mind. He knew his absent friend had scant patience for the pen and would at any time, in his own phrase, rather design a tomb than answer a note. But when a month had passed without news he began to be half anxious and half angry, and addressed the young sculptor three lines, in care of a Continental banker, begging him at least to give some sign of life. A week afterwards came an answer—brief and dated Baden-Baden. "I know I've been a great brute," Roderick wrote, "not to have sent you a word before; 134