Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/331

 and the mass of her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess on a cloud or a nymph on a Greek gem, but never in a mere modern girl. And you may take this for truth, because I 'm not in love with her. On the contrary I sometimes quite detest her. Her education has been simply infernal. She is corrupt, perverse, as proud as a potentate, and a coquette of the first magnitude; but she 's intelligent and bold and free, and so awfully on the lookout for sensations that if you set rightly to work you may enlist her imagination in a good cause as well as in a bad. The other day I tried to bring it over to my side. I happened to have some talk with her to which it was possible to give a serious turn, and I boldly broke ground and begged her to suffer my poor friend to go in peace. After leading me rather a dance—in conversation—she consented, and the next day, with a single word, she packed him off to Naples to drown his humiliation in poisonous waters. I 've come to the conclusion that she 's more dangerous in her virtuous moods than in her vicious, and that she probably has a way of turning her back which is the most maddening thing in the world. She 's an actress, she could n't forego doing it with a flourish, and it was just the flourish that made it work wrong. I wished her of course to let him down easy; but she must have the curtain drop on an attitude, and her attitudes don't in the least do for inflammable natures Roderick made an admirable bust of her at the beginning of the winter, and a dozen women came rushing to him to be done, mutatis mutandis, in the 297