Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/119

 he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man of monuments, looked at his watch and fixed his eye on his adversary. "What is it and how far?" And whatever the case, though he might seem to hesitate he never declined. He stepped into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside him to answer questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular aversion to slow driving), and rolled, in all probability through a dusty suburb, to the goal of his pilgrimage. When the goal was a disappointment, when the church was meagre or the ruin a heap of rubbish, he never protested nor berated his adviser; he looked with an impartial eye upon great monuments and small, made the guide recite his lesson, listened to it religiously, asked if there were nothing else to be seen in the neighbourhood, and drove back again at a rattling pace. It is to be feared that his perception of the difference between the florid and the refined had not reached the stage of confidence, and that he might often have been seen—as we have already seen him—gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. The wrong occasion was a part of his pastime in Europe as well as the right, and his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of those people who have none, and Newman now and then, in an unguided stroll through a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular deep commotion. It was not an excitement, not a perplexity; it involved an extraordinary sense of recreation. 89