Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/95

 his work there is no lost time. Everything he looks at teaches or suggests something."

"That 's a tempting doctrine to young men with a taste for sitting by the hour with the page unturned, watching the flies buzz, or the frost melt, on the window-pane. Our young friend in this way must have laid up stores of information that I never suspected."

"It 's very possible," said Rowland with an unresentful smile, "that he will prove some day the happier artist for some of those very same lazy reveries."

This theory was apparently very grateful to Mrs. Hudson, who had never had the case put for her son with such ingenious hopefulness, and who found herself disrelishing the singular situation of seeming to side against her own flesh and blood with a lawyer whose conversational tone betrayed the habit of public cross-questioning.

"My son, then," she ventured to enquire, "my son has exceptional—what you would call remarkable—powers?"

"To my sense distinctly remarkable powers."

Poor Mrs. Hudson actually smiled, broadly, gleefully, and glanced at Miss Garland as if to invite her to do likewise. But the girl's face remained as serious as the eastern sky when the opposite sunset is too feeble to make it glow. "Do you really know?" she asked, looking at Rowland.

"One can't know in such a matter save after proof, and proof takes time. But one can believe."

"And you believe?"

"I believe." 61