Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/265

 by the thousand—the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose candle burnt out in a night. Some of them groped their way along without it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the wayside to beg. Who shall say that I am not one of these? Who shall assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum? Nothing proves it, and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of shaking off the dust of my desert. If you believed so, my dear fellow, you did it at your own risk. What am I, what are the best of us, but a desperate experiment? Do I more or less idiotically succeed—do I more or less sublimely fail? I seem to myself to be the last circumstance it depends on. I'm prepared, at any rate, for a fizzle. It won't be a tragedy, simply because I sha'n't assist at it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When I 've played my last card I shall cease to care for the game. I 'm not making vulgar threats of the dagger or the bowl; for destiny, I trust, won't make me further ridiculous by forcing me publicly to fumble with them. But I have a conviction that if the hour strikes here," and he tapped his forehead, "I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a something as pretty, let us hope, as the drifted spray of a fountain; that 's what I shall have been. For the past ten days I 've had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming before me. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the blighted ship in the 'Ancient Mariner'!"

Rowland listened to this outpouring, as he often 231