Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/209

 It was reassuring to hear that Roderick in his own view was but "just beginning" to spread his wings, and Rowland, if he had had any forebodings, might have suffered them to be modified by this declaration. This was the first time since their meeting at Geneva that the youth had mentioned his cousin's name, but the ice being broken he indulged for some time afterwards in frequent allusions to his betrothed, which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied, consideration. An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age—possibly an affectionate maiden aunt—who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated; perhaps presented him with a cheque for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it were not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter first and last in a great many different ways—he had looked at it in all possible lights. There was something that mocked any sense of due sequences in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the "type" that, other things being what they were, would most have touched him, and the mystery of attraction and desire, always so baffling if seen only from without, quite defied analysis here. Just why it was that Roderick should not in consistency have received his impression his comrade would have been at a loss to say; but the 175