Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/368

 "Because I'm so convinced that you 've a mind formed to do justice to everything interesting and beautiful. You 're extremely intelligent."

"You don't know," she simply said.

"In that matter one feels. I really think I know better than you. I don't want to seem patronising, but I see in you a capital subject for development. Give yourself the best company, trust yourself, let yourself go."

She looked away from him for some moments, down the gorgeous vista of the great church. "But what you say," she said at last, "means change."

"Change for the better," Rowland insisted.

"How can one tell? As one stands one knows the worst. It seems to me very frightful to develop," she went on.

"One is in for it in one way or another, and one might as well do it with a good grace as with a bad. Since one can't escape life it 's better to take it by the hand."

"Is this what you call life?" she presently asked.

"What do you mean by 'this'?"

"What 's around us—all this splendour, all Rome; pictures, ruins, statues, beggars, monks."

"It 's not all of it, but it 's a large part of it. All these things are impregnated with life; they 're the results of an immemorial, a complex and accumulated, civilisation."

"'Immemorial, complex, accumulated'—ah, those are words I 'm afraid of."

"There may be better ones for what I mean," Rowland smiled; "but I don't believe it 's in you to 334