Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/505

 been in Italy; having always lived in the country she had missed in Rome and Florence that social solitude mitigated by bushes and rocks, primarily dear to the true New England temperament. The little unpainted Oberland inn, with its plank partitions, its milk-pans standing in the sun, its "help," in the form of angular young women of the countryside, reminded her of places of summer sojourn in her native land; and the beautiful historic chambers of Villa Pandolfini passed from her conscience without a regret and without having in the least modified her conception of the house submissive to "keeping." If Roderick, on the other hand, had changed his sky, he had still not changed his mind; he was not sensibly nearer to having got back into the traces than he had shown himself during his declaration of despair by the Italian lakeside. He now kept this despair to himself and went decently enough about the ordinary business of life; but it was easy to see that he wasn't, in the new phrase, "there"—his meekness was so mechanical and his present motives somehow so inscrutable. In that sad half-hour on the Como promontory there had been a fierce truth under the impression of which Rowland found himself at last forswearing criticism and censure. He began to feel it quite idle to appeal to his comrade's will; there was no will left—its place was a mocking void. This view of the case indeed was occasionally contravened by certain indications on Roderick's part of the surviving faculty of resistance to disagreeable obligation: one might still have said, if one had been disposed to improve the occasion at any hazard, that there was a 471