Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/131

 the eyes of the lady whom he had found standing in Mrs. Tristram's drawing-room; four months had elapsed and he had not forgotten them yet. He had looked—he had made a point of looking—into a great many other eyes in the interval, but the only ones he thought of now were Madame de Cintré's. If he wanted to make out where the golden afternoon hung heaviest would n't the place perhaps be in Madame de Cintré's eyes? He would certainly find something of interest there, call it all bravely bright or call it engagingly obscure.

But there came to him sometimes too, through this vague rich forecast, the thought of his past life and the long array of years (they had begun so early) during which he had had nothing in his head but his possible "haul." They seemed far away now, for his present attitude was more than a holiday, it was almost a repudiation. He had told Tom Tristram the pendulum was swinging back, and the backward swing, visibly, had not yet ended. Still, the possibility of hauls, which had dropped in the other quarter, wore to his mind a different aspect at different hours. In its train a thousand forgotten episodes came trooping before him. Some of them he looked complacently enough in the face; from some he averted his head. They were old triumphs of nerve, even of bluff, mere cold memories of the heat of battle, the high competitive rage. Some of them, as they lived again, he felt decidedly proud of; he admired himself as if he had been looking at another man. And in fact many of the qualities that make a great deed were there; the decision, the resolution, 101