Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/382

 said; "you 'll never consent to any disinterested conversation."

She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon something personal. But this time she assented; she confessed she was eager for items. "One must make hay while the sun shines. I must lay up a store against dark days. After all, I can't believe that I shall spend my life here."

He knew he had divined her real motive; but he felt that if he might have said to her—what it seemed impossible to say—that fortune possibly had a bitter disappointment in store for her, she would have been capable of answering immediately, after the first sense of pain: "Say then I 'm laying up resources for solitude!"

But all the accusations were not his own. He had been waiting once while they talked—they were differing and arguing a little—to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her "Murray," into which she had inserted it to keep her place. It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real fear she would ever turn priggish. The simple human truth was that Rowland was jealous of science. In preaching art and history to her he had slighted again the good cause that he might never, never plead. Suddenly sinking, at any rate, the question of his lessons or of her learning, she faced him very frankly and began to frown. At the same time she let the "Murray" slide to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance that he made no movement to pick it up. 348