Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/539

 "Then with what evidence?"

Roderick hesitated. "The way you treated Christina Light. I call that grossly obtuse."

"Obtuse?" Rowland repeated, frowning.

"Thick-skinned, beneath your good fortune."

"My good fortune?"

"There it is — it's all news to you! You had pleased her, interested her. I don't say she was dying of love for you, but she liked you so much that she would have been glad if you could have become a little aware of it."

"We 'll let this pass!" Rowland said after a silence.

"Oh, I don't insist. I 've only her own word for it."

"Her own word?"

"You've noticed, at least, I suppose, that she's not in general afraid to speak. I never repeated it, not because I was jealous, but because I was curious to see how long your ignorance would last if left to itself."

"I frankly confess it would have lasted for ever. And yet I don't at all hold my insensibility proved."

"Oh, don't say that," cried Roderick, "or I shall begin to suspect — what I must do you the justice to say I never have suspected — that you take yourself even more seriously than we, your good friends, take you. Upon my word, when I think of all this, your protest, as you call it, against the vivacity of my attention to that young lady strikes me as having its absurd side. There 's something monstrous in a man's pretending to lay down the law to a state of sensibility with which he 's unacquainted — in his expecting of 505