Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/458

 really believed I was a swell. But do you know what has become of me now? I 've gone utterly to the devil."

There was something in the ring of his voice as he uttered these words which sent them home with convincing force. He was not talking for effect or for the mere personal pleasure of extravagant and paradoxical utterance, as had often enough been the case ere this; he was not even talking viciously or ill-humouredly. He was talking passionately, desperately, sincerely, from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother's confidence. His cruel eloquence brought the poor lady to her feet, and she stood there with clasped hands, petrified and voiceless. Mary Garland quickly left her place and, coming straight to him and laying her hand on his arm, let her eyes fix him with an effort of influence of which she seemed now to wish to test for the first time the real, the sovereign power. But the power proved the mere weak fumble of a key in a lock too hard for it; he made no movement to disengage himself, but it was as if he wondered for the moment what she could want. Rowland had been living for the past month in such intolerable expectancy of disaster that, now that the ice was broken and the fatal cold splash administered, his foremost feeling on receiving his share of the spray was almost elation. But the next instant his eternal second thought, his vision of the case for others, had corrected it.

"I really don't make out," he observed, "the profit of your talking in just this way at just this 424