Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/232

 at in that way she 's certainly very much to be pitied, and, indeed, altogether, though I don't think she either means all she says or, by a great deal, says all she means, I feel very sorry for her."

Rowland met the two ladies about this time at several entertainments and looked at Christina with a kind of imaginative attendrissement. He suspected more than once that there had been a passionate scene between them about coming out, and he wondered what arguments Mrs. Light had found effective. But Christina's face told no tales, and she moved about, beautiful and silent, looking absently over people's heads, barely heeding the men who pressed about her, and suggesting somehow that the soul of a world-wearied mortal had found its way into the blooming body of a goddess. "Where in the world has Miss Light been before she's turned twenty-one," observers with pretensions to earnestness asked, "to have left all her illusions behind?" And the general verdict was that, though she was incomparably beautiful, she was too disconcertingly indifferent. She was scarcely even vain enough. Young ladies who were not indifferent, and yet sometimes perhaps not beautiful either, were free to reflect that she was "not at all liked."

It would have been difficult to guess, all the same, how they reconciled this conviction with a variety of contradictory evidence and in especial with the spectacle of Roderick's inveterate devotion. All Rome might behold that he at least "liked" Christina Light. Wherever she appeared he was either awaiting her or immediately followed her. He was 198