Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/47

 presence on earth shine from afar. He was passive, pliable, frank, extremely slow at his books and inordinately fond of trout-fishing. His hair, a memento of his Dutch ancestry, was of the fairest shade of yellow, his complexion absurdly rosy and the measurement of his middle, when he was about ten years old, quite alarmingly large. This, however, was but an episode in his growth; he became afterwards a fresh-coloured, yellow-bearded man, but was never accused of anything more material than a manly stoutness. He emerged from childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a less circuitous course might have been taken to make him happy, but with a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human freedom and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was about fifteen he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his mother was a saint. She had always been a very vivid presence in his life, but of an intensity so mild, so diffused and so regulated that his sense was fully opened to it only by the danger of losing her. She had an illness which for many months was liable at any moment to carry her off, and during her long-arrested convalescence she removed the mask that she had worn for years by her husband's order. Rowland spent his days at her side, and felt before long as if he had made a new friend. All his impressions of this period were to be commented upon andin terpreted during the comparative ease of the future, and it was only at the later time that he understood how his mother had been for fifteen long years a 13