Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/116

 interview with Mademoiselle Noémie; and left the old man nursing his breast-pocket in an ecstasy which the sharpest paternal discomposure might have been defied to dissipate.

He started on his travels with all his usual appearance of slow-strolling leisure and all his essential directness and intensity of aim. No man seemed less in a hurry and yet no man enabled brief periods to serve him more liberally. He had practical instincts which signally befriended him in his trade of tourist. He found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory was excellent when once his attention had been at all cordially given, and he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had formally not understood a word, in full possession of the particular item he had desired to elicit. His appetite for items was large, and although many of those he noted might have seemed woefully dry and colourless to the ordinary sentimental traveller, a careful inspection of the list would have shown that his toughness had sensitive spots. In the charming city of Brussels—his first stopping-place after leaving Paris—he asked a great many questions about the street-cars and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of this familiar symbol of American civilisation; but he was also greatly struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hôtel de Ville and wondered if they might n't "get up" something like it in San Francisco. He stood long in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of 86