Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/229

 "She looks half like a Madonna and half like a ballerina!"

Mr. Leavenworth and Roderick arrived, however, under Rowland's anxious eyes, at an understanding that testified not a little on the part of each to the power nobly to unbend, and the young master, with a habit he had of finally coming round, in a rush of indifferent generosity, from some first crude challenge to patience—a habit that Rowland, whom it had caused to forgive him many things, had known himself privately to pronounce irresistible—the young master good-naturedly promised to do his best to rise to his client's conception. "His conception be hanged!" Roderick exclaimed none the less after Mr. Leavenworth had departed. "His conception is sitting on an india-rubber cushion with a pen in her ear and the lists of the stock-exchange in her hand. It 's a case for doing, of course, exactly as one likes—yet how can one like, by any possibility, anything that such a blatant humbug as that possibly can? It 's as much as one can do to like his awful money. I don't think," our young man added, "that I ever before swallowed anything that wanted so little to go down, and I 'm doubtless on my way now to any grovelling you please."

Mrs. Light meanwhile had fairly established herself in Roman society. "The dear God knows how," Madame Grandoni said to Rowland, who had mentioned to her several evidences of the lady's prosperity; "but a door is forced, of course, only as a heavy piece of furniture is moved—you shut your eyes and you push hard. A month ago she knew no 195