Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/538

 was clearly greater than he had expected. "You've succeeded in making this thing uncommonly unpleasant!" he at last exclaimed.

"I 'm sorry," said Rowland, "but I can't see it in any other way."

"That I believe, but what I resent is that the range of your vision should pretend to be the limit of my action. You can't feel for me nor judge for me, and there are certain things you know nothing about. I have suffered, sir!" Roderick went on with increasing emphasis and with the reawakened ring of his fine old Virginian pomposity. "I 've suffered damnable torments. Have I been such a placid, contented, comfortable creature these last six months that when I find a chance to forget my misery I should take such pains not to profit by it? You ask too much, it seems to me — for a man who himself has no occasion to play the hero. I don't say that invidiously; it 's your disposition, and you can't help it. But decidedly there are certain things you know nothing about."

Rowland listened to this outbreak with open eyes, and Roderick, if he had been less intent upon his own unhappy cause, would probably have perceived that he turned pale. "These things — what are they?" Rowland asked.

"Why, they're women, principally, and what relates to women. Women for you, by what I can make out, scarce have an existence. You 've no imagination of them, no sense of them, nothing in you to be touched by them."

"That 's a funny charge," said Rowland gravely.

"I don't make it without evidence." 504