Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/318

 "What I desire is this—that your great influence with him should be exerted for his good, that it should help him and not retard him. Understand me well. You probably know that your admirers, your victims, have rather a hapless time of it. I can answer for two of them. You don't know your own mind very well, I imagine, and as you like being admired the poor devil on whom you have cast your spell has to pay all the expenses. Since we 're really being frank I wonder whether I might n't say the great word."

"You need n't; I know it. I'm a beastly low flirt."

"No, not a 'low' one, rather a high one, since I 'm making an appeal to your intelligence and your generosity. I 'm pretty sure you can't imagine yourself marrying my friend."

"There's nothing I can't imagine. That's my difficulty."

Rowland's brow contracted impatiently. "I can't imagine it then!"

Christina flushed faintly; then very gently, "I'm not so bad as you think," she said.

"It 's not a question of badness; it 's a question of whether the conditions don't make the thing an extreme improbability."

"Worse and worse. I can be bullied then—or bribed?"

"You 're not so candid as you pretend to be. My feeling 's simply this," Rowland went on. "Hudson, as I understand him, does n't need, as an artist, the stimulus of strong emotion, of precarious passion. He 's better without it; he 's emotional and 284