Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/481

 turning her eyes much more directly to his perfidious patron, on whom they rested in the mutest, the feeblest, the most unbearable reprehension. She never phrased her accusations, but he felt them gather in the poor lady's inward gloom like monsters and spectral shapes. These things were a felt weight, of the heaviest, to him, and if at the outset of his experiment he had seen the possibility of them, how dimly so ever, in the opposite scale, the brilliancy of Roderick's promises would have counted for little. It would have been better perhaps had she appeared voluble and vulgar, for neat and noiseless and dismally ladylike as she sat there, keeping her grievance green with her soft-dropping tears, her forbearance had somehow an edge and her propriety a chill. He did his best to be thoroughly civil to her and to treat her with distinguished deference, but perhaps his exasperated nerves made him overshoot the mark and rendered his attentions too grimly formal. She met them at moments almost as if they had represented a longer stretch of duplicity. She seemed capable of believing that he was trying to make a fool of her; she would have thought him cruelly recreant if he had suddenly turned his back, and yet she gave him no visible credit for consistency. It often struck him that he had too abjectly forfeited his freedom. Was n't it grotesque, at his age, to be put into a corner for punishment?

But Mary Garland had helped him before and she helped him now—helped him not less than he had assured himself she would when he found him self drifting to Florence. Yet her help was rendered 447