Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/381

 "I've felt that desire only on general principles. Shall I tell you what I feel now? If America has made you thus far, why not let America finish you? I should like to ship you back without delay and see what becomes of you. If that sounds uncivil I admit there 's a cold intellectual curiosity in it."

She shook her head. "The charm's broken; the thread 's snapped! I prefer to remain here."

Invariably, when he was inclined to make of some chance of their talk a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him; she let the application, no matter how awkwardly for him, lie where it had fallen. Once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he told her she was very secretive. At this she coloured a little, and he said that in default of any larger confidence it would at least be a satisfaction to make her confess to that charge. But even this satisfaction she denied him, and his only revenge was in risking, two or three times afterwards, an allusion to her duplicity that was violent enough for a joke. He told her that she was both abysmal and tortuous and he wound up on one occasion by pronouncing her labyrinthine. "Very good," she answered almost indifferently, "and now please remind me again—I have forgotten it—of what you said an 'architrave' was."

It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her—still by way of pleasantry, but in a tone in which, had she been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardour—with having an insatiable avidity for facts. "You 're always snatching at useful instruction," he 347