Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/312

 "Oh, speak to me of that! I 've been through that too, though I 'm not so much a good Catholic as a bad one. Mamma's what I call a good one—ecco! There was a time when I wanted immensely to be a nun; it was not a laughing matter. It was when I was about sixteen years old. I read the 'Imitation' and the Life of Saint Catherine; I fully believed in the miracles of the saints and I was dying to have one of my own—little of a saint as I was! The least little accident that could have been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the cloister. I had for three months—positively—the perfect vocation. It passed away, and as I sat here just now I was wondering what has become of it."

Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady's tone which he would have described as an easy use of her imagination, and this epitome of her religious experience failed to strike him as an authentic text. But it was no disfiguring mask, since she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporised reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to carry herself further and further, to see herself in situation and action; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her really a starting-point in experience, so that the many-coloured flowers of fiction that blossomed in her talk were perversions of fact only if one could n't take them for sincerities of spirit. And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have been, under the imagined 278