Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/407

 swallowed his tea with great gusto and a wait for more—more of everything; by all of which she could know he was gratified. In a moment he intimated that in so far as he had sinned he was now quite square with his conscience, but Madame Grandoni had already forgotten.

"The Back Woods then," she said, "grow such interesting plants? I like your young lady—she 's not a bit banal. And yet she escapes it so quietly — not, as they sometimes do, by standing on her head. I think that if she 'll let me make a friend of her I sha'n't bore her either. I have a flair — oh yes, in spite of Augusta, Augusta Victoria as I now call her—for the chance of their boring me. Miss Garlant, you deep creature, defies at any rate your account of her."

"She's unfortunately plain," said Rowland, laughing and reënforcing his account; "very simple and artless and ignorant—"

"But thoroughly neat and respectable!"—his old friend took him up. "Which, being interpreted, means 'She 's very handsome, very subtle, very clever, and has read hundreds of volumes on winter evenings in the country.'"

"You 're a veritable sorceress," Rowland made answer; "you frighten me away." As he was turning to leave her there rose above the hum of voices in the drawing-room the sharp grotesque note of a barking dog. Their eyes met in a glance of intelligence.

"There 's the veritable sorceress!" Madame Grandoni declared. "The sorceress and her necromantic 373