Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/221

 at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modelling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair's-breadth that 's not admirably finished. And then her divine mouth—it might really be that of a goddess! It 's as if a pair of lips had been shaped just not to utter all the platitudes and all the pretences." Later, after he had been working for a week, he was to declare that if the girl had been inordinately plain she would still be the most wonderful of women and the best conceivable company. "I 've quite forgotten her beauty," he said, "or rather I've ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her. She 's all one, and all impossibly interesting."

"What does she do—what does she say that 's so remarkable?" Rowland asked.

"Say? Sometimes nothing—sometimes every thing. She's never the same, and you never know how she 'll be. And it's not for a pose—it's because there are fifty of her. Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore. She hardly looks at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work. On other days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions and pours out the most irresistible nonsense—is really most extraordinarily droll. She's a creature of moods; you can't count upon her; she keeps one's expectation, she keeps one's nerves, on the stretch: she's as far from banal as it's possible to be. And then, bless you, my dear man, she has seen, compared with you and me, for instance, so 187