Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/430

 Roderick looked at him for a moment with a lazy radiance. "Pray don't!" he simply answered.

"You deserve I should tell her you're a very shabby fellow."

"My dear Rowland, the comfort with you is that I can so beautifully trust you. You 're incapable of doing anything the least tiny bit indelicate."

"You mean to lie here then smelling your roses and nursing your visions and leaving your mother and Miss Garland to eat their hearts out?"

"Can I go and flaunt my felicity in their faces? Wait till I get used to it a trifle. I 've done them a villainous wrong, but I can at least forbear to add insult to injury. I may be the biggest donkey, or the blackest monster, in Rome, but for the moment I have taken it into my head to be glad to be alive. I should n't be able to keep it from them; my being glad, or even my being alive, on such a basis, would mortally scandalise them. So I lock myself up as a dangerous character."

"Well, I can only hope that your gladness may not grow less or your danger greater."

Roderick closed his eyes again and sniffed at his rose. "God's will be done!"

On this Rowland left him and repaired directly to Mrs. Light's. This afflicted lady hurried forward to meet him. Since the Cavaliere's visit to Rowland she had taken a reef, as the saying is, in her distress, but she was evidently still in high agitation and she clutched Rowland by his two hands as if in the shipwreck of her hopes he were her single floating spar. Rowland greatly pitied her—so respectable is 396