Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/377

 watched them on their way over the crest of the hill, and when her attention seemed not likely to be missed it went hurrying after them and ran breathless at their side and begged them for the secret. Rowland took a high satisfaction in observing that she never mistook the second-best for the best and that when she stood in great presences she recognised the importance of the occasion. She said many things that he thought very happy—that is if they meant certain other things that they perhaps did n't, and meant all of those. This point he usually tried to ascertain; but he was obliged to proceed cautiously, for the effect of her so suddenly-quickened vision of a more mixed order than she had ever dreamt of was to make her see everything as mixed, and cross-examination, by that law, as necessarily ironic. She wished to know just where she was going—what she should gain or lose. This was partly on account of the purity and rigidity of a mind that had not lived with its door ajar upon the high-road of cosmopolite chatter, for passing phrases to drop in and out at their pleasure, but that had none the less looked out, ever, from the threshold, for any straggler on the "march of ideas," any limping rumour or broken-winged echo of life, that would stop and be cherished as a guest. It was even more perhaps because she was aware of a sort of growing self-respect, a sense of devoting her consciousness not to her own ends, but to those of another whose career would be high and splendid. She had been brought up to think a great deal of "nature" and nature's innocent laws; but now Rowland had talked to her 343