Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/383

 "You 're awfully inconsistent, Mr. Mallet, you know," she said.

"Oh, nothing so makes for good relations as inconsistency."

"Not of your elaborate kind. That first day we were in Saint Peter's you said things that inspired me. You bade me plunge into all this. I was all ready; I only wanted a little push; you gave me a great one; here I am up to my neck! And now, instead of helping me to swim, you stand on the shore—the shore of superior information—and fling pebbles at me!"

"Pebbles, my dear young lady? They 're life-preservers? I must have played my part very ill."

"Your part? What 's your part supposed to have been?"

He hesitated a moment. "That of usefulness pure and simple."

"I don't understand you!" she said; and picking up her guide-book she fairly buried her nose in it.

That evening he made her a speech which she perhaps understood as little. "Do you remember my begging you the other day to do occasionally as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented."

"Very tacitly!"

"I 've never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I should like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call flinging pebbles, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I shall know what you mean—a word to the wise!"

There came a morning that they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny chaos of rich decay and irrelevant renewal, of scattered and overtangled 349