Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/208

 "Miss Garland could hardly leave your mother alone," Rowland judiciously observed.

"Oh, of course my mother should come! I think I must suggest it in my next letter. It will take her a year or two to make up her mind to it, but if she consents it will brighten her up. It 's too small and too starved a life over there even for a person who asks—asks, what do I say? insists on—so little here below as my mother. It 's hard to imagine," Roderick added, "any change in Mary being a change for the better; but I suppose there's no crime in seeing the profit of a change for her. She would undertake, I dare say, not to be altered by it, in any essential way, enough to make a scandal. One 's never so good, I suppose, but that one can improve."

Rowland took in for a moment the tone of this, and he felt fifty words in answer to it rise to his lips. But he ended by pronouncing only a few and none of them those that had at first risen. "If you wish your mother and Miss Garland to come, hadn't you better go home and bring them?"

"Ah, my dear man, I like the way you talk of my going 'home'! The more I should 'go' the less of that sacred name there would be about it—so that not really to become homeless I had better keep my distance. At present, moreover," Roderick pursued, "it would just exactly break the charm. I'm just beginning to profit, to get accustomed to—well, to not being accustomed; just beginning, that is, to live into my possibilities. Northampton Main Street—even for three days again—has become, I think, my principal impossibility." 174