Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/540

 a fellow a kind of sacrifice that it has been so easy for him not to have the occasion to make, and of which he does n't understand the very terms."

"Oh, oh!" cried Rowland.

"It's very easy to exclaim," Roderick went on; "but you must remember that there are such things as nerves and needs and senses and desires and a restless demon within, a demon that may sleep sometimes for a day, or for six months, but that sooner or later starts up and thumps at your ribs till you listen to him. If you can't conceive it, take it on trust and let a poor visionary devil live his life as he can!"

These words affected his sad auditor as something heard in a dream; it was impossible they had been actually spoken — so supreme an expression were they of the high insolence of egotism. Reality was somehow never so consistent and complete. But Roderick sat there balancing his beautiful head, and the echoes of his ugly mistake still lingered along the half-muffled mountain-side. Rowland suddenly felt the cup of his own ordeal full to overflowing, and his long-gathered bitterness surged into the simple clear passion of pain at wasted kindness. But he spoke without violence, and Roderick was probably at first far from measuring the depths beneath his tone.

"You 're incredibly ungrateful, I think, and you 're talking arrogant nonsense. What do you know about my needs and senses and my imagination? How do you know whether I 've loved or suffered? If I 've held my tongue and not troubled you with my complaints, you find it the most natural thing in the world to put a belittling construction on my silence! I 've 506