Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/508

 day she had declared in a sudden burst of bitterness that she was completely disillusioned and that she gave up her recreant lover our friend's expectation would have gone half-way to meet her. And certainly, if her troubled spirit had taken this course, no generous critic, he reasoned, would have pronounced her vain. She had been offered an extent of cold shoulder on which few girls could have schooled themselves to rest their eyes so long. There were girls indeed the beauty of whose nature, like that of Burd Helen in the ballad, lay in clinging to the man of their love through bush and brier and in bowing their head to all hard usage. That behaviour had of course a grace of its own, but Rowland was far from seeing it as proper to Mary Garland. She asked something for what she gave, and he was yet to make out what had been given her. She believed in the conquests of ambition, and would surely never long persuade herself that it was as interesting to see them missed—even helplessly and pathetically—as to see them strenuously reached. Rowland passed, before he had done, an angry day; for he had not been able to stifle a sense that she had in a manner—how did he like to put it?—"transferred her esteem" to him. And yet here she was throwing herself back into Roderick's arms at his slightest overture—so that a fatuous man (which, thank goodness, he was n't) might almost have called her a coquette, or at least have asked her what she "meant." He stated to himself that his position was abject and that all the philosophy he could bring to bear upon it would make it neither honourable nor comfortable. He would go away and 474