Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/50

 pleasure. He had frequent fits of melancholy in which he declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. His was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one, and he was for ever looking in vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward mixture of moral and aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made an ineffective reformer and an indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action of some thoroughly keen kind on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest, perhaps, he wished he had been a vigorous young man of genius without a penny. As it was, he could only buy pictures and not paint them; and in the way of action he had to content himself with making a rule to render scrupulous justice to fine strokes of it in others. On the whole he had an incorruptible modesty. With his blooming complexion and his quiet grey eyes he felt the friction of existence more than was suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he engaged to believe that all women were fair, all men were brave and the world a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary should be distinctly proved.

Cecilia's blooming garden and shady porch had seemed so friendly to repose and a cigar that she reproached him the next morning with indifference to her ordered little parlour, not less in its way a 16