Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/172

 like the battered knight who yet sports a taller plume. He made no professions of penitence, but he practised an unmitigated frankness, and his remorse might be taken for granted. He conveyed in every phrase that he had done with the flesh and the devil and was counting the hours till he should re-enter the true temple of his faith. We shall not rehearse his confession in detail; its main outline serves our turn. He had fallen in with people who really knew how to be low—which he, poor wretch, did n't, only he had thought it, in their company, a trick to be learnt. What could he do? He never read books and he had no studio; in one way or an other he had to pass the time. He passed it in dangling about several very pretty women and reflecting that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit under a tree looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and show its teeth. Attached to these ladies were gentlemen with wonderful names, polyglot ambrosial gentlemen who walked about in clouds of fragrance, called him mon cher, sat at roulette all night and supped the next morning. Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them types of a high, even if a somewhat spent, civilisation. He was surprised at his curiosity, but he let it take its course. It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies almost crudely on the lookout for mementos of friendship, even if in no more permanent form than that of expensive bouquets and of bushels of bonbons, and for rides in the Black Forest on shining hired 138