Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/38

 place, in your character. You mean, if you will pardon my putting it so, thoroughly well. Ask Bessie if you don't hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers."

"He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson," Bessie declared roundly.

Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy, and Cecilia went on to develop her idea. "Your circumstances, in the second place, suggest the idea of some sort of social usefulness. You 're intelligent and are well informed, and your benevolence, if one may call it benevolence, would be discriminating. You 're rich and unoccupied, so that it might be abundant. Therefore I say you 're a man to do something on a large scale. Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to think that Virtue herself is setting a bad example."

"Heaven forbid," cried Rowland, "that I should set the examples of virtue! I 'm quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don't do something on the grand scale it is that my genius is altogether imitative and that I've not recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur. Pray, what shall I do? Found an orphan asylum or build a dormitory for Harvard College? I 'm not rich enough to do either in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that yet a while I feel too young to strike my grand coup. I 'm holding myself ready for inspiration. I 'm waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly. If inspiration comes at forty it will be a hundred pities to have tied up my money-bag at thirty."

"Well, of course I give you decent time," said 4