Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/328

 Have n't I already told you about Miss Light? Last winter everything was perfection. Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things—proved himself, as I supposed, sound all through. He was strong, he was first-rate; I felt perfectly secure, and paid myself the most fulsome compliments. We had passed at a bound into the open sea and left danger behind. But in the summer I began to be uneasy, though I succeeded in keeping down alarm. When he came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had turned and that we were close upon the rocks. It 's in fact another case of Ulysses and the Sirens; only Roderick refuses to be tied to the mast. He 's the most extraordinary being, the strangest mixture of the clear and the obscure. I don't understand so much power—because it is power—going with so much weakness, such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses. The poor fellow is n't made right, and it 's really not his fault; Nature has given him his faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it. It 's as if she had shied her great gold brick at him and cried 'Look out for your head!' I never knew a creature harder to advise or assist when he 's not in the mood for listening. I suppose there 's some key or other to his tangle, but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can't believe our stars so cruel as simply to have turned the lock and thrown the key away. He makes a notorious fool of me, and if he tires out my temper he does n't my attention. Sometimes I think he has n't a grain of conscience and sometimes I find him all too morbidly scrupulous. He takes things 294