Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/41

 likeness to an active pursuit. It's always lotus-eating, only you sit down at table and the lotuses are served up on rococo china. It 's all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of this—that if Roman life does n't do something substantial to make you happier it must contribute rather to unhinge or upset you. It seems to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine or riding too often in the shadow of the crumbling aqueducts. In such recreations the chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your æsthetic nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of Mignon when she danced her egg-dance."

"I should have said, my dear Rowland, with all recognition of your eloquence," Cecilia said with a laugh, "that your nerves were tough—that your eggs were hard!"

"That being stupid, you mean, I might be happy? Upon my word, I'm not so happy as that! I'm clever enough to want more than I've got. I'm tired of myself, my own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company. True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. Unfortunately I have no errand, and nobody will trust me with one. I want to care for something or for somebody. And I want to care, don't you see? with a certain intensity; even, if you can believe it, with a certain passion. I can't just now be intense 7