Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/484

 of experience, than Christina had ever made of the stuff of her wild weaving. She did you the honours of her intelligence with a less accomplished grace, but was not that retreat as fragrant a maiden's bower? If in poor Christina's strangely mixed nature there was circle within circle and depth beneath depth, it was to be believed that the object of Rowland's preference, though she did not amuse herself with dropping stones into her soul and waiting to hear them fall, could none the less draw from the reservoir in question as brimming a bucket of energy. She had believed Roderick was "splendid" when she bade him farewell beneath their New England elms, and this synthetic term, to her young, strenuous, concentrated imagination, had meant many things. If it was to know itself chilled to the core, that would be because disenchantment had won the battle at each successive point and was now encamped on the field.

She showed even in her face and step, meanwhile, the tension of the watcher and the time-keeper: poor Roderick's muddled sum was a mystifying page to a girl who had supposed genius to be to one's spiritual economy what a large balance at the bank is to one's domestic. And yet our friend never tasted with her, as with Mrs. Hudson, of that acrid undercurrent — the impertinent implication that he had defrauded her of a promised security. Did this spring in her from a vague imagination of his own feeling, or even from a vague pity for it? The answer might have been hopeful, inasmuch as she had almost let him think before leaving Rome that she 450