Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/307

 ; my laugh dies away before it begins. Your friend Stendhal writes on his book-covers (I never got further) that he has seen too early in life la beauté parfaite. I don't know how early he saw it; I saw it before I was born—in another state of being. I can't describe it positively; I can only say I don't find it anywhere now. Not at the bottom of champagne glasses; not, strange as it may seem, in that extra half-yard or so of shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose. I don't find it at noisy supper-tables where half a dozen ugly men with pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; nor when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets and go out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there like gnawed bones stuck into the earth. Everything 's mean and dusky and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant society are the meanest and shabbiest of all. They have no real spontaneity; they are nothing but parrots and popinjays. They have no more dignity than so many grasshoppers. Nothing is good but one!" And he jumped up and stood looking at one of his wrought figures, which shone vaguely across the room in the dim lamp light.

"Yes, do tell us," said Rowland, "what to hold on by!"

"Those things of mine were pretty devilish good," he answered. "But my idea was so much better—and that 's what I mean!"

Rowland said nothing. He was willing to wait 273