Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/158

THE AMERICAN hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show me as not performing a mere ceremony."

"Well, here I am for you as large as life," said Newman as he extended his legs.

"I don't know what you mean," the young man went on, by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I'm a great laugher; it's the only way, in general, is n't it? not to—well, not to crever d'ennui. But it's not in order that we may laugh together—or separately—that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with a confidence and a candour which I find rapidly getting the better of me, you have interested me without having done me the honour, I think, in the least to try for it—by having acted so consistently in your own interest: that, I mean, of your enlightened curiosity." All this was uttered, to Newman's sense, with a marked proficiency, as from a habit of intercourse that was yet not "office" intercourse, and, in spite of the speaker's excellent English, with the perfect form, as our friend supposed, of the superlative Frenchman; but there was at the same time something in it of a more personal and more pressing intention. What this might prove to have for him Newman suddenly found himself rather yearning to know. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to the last roll of his so frequent rotary r; and if he had met him out in bare Arizona he would have felt it proper to address him with a "How-d'ye-do, Mosseer?" Yet there was that in his physiognomy which seemed to suspend a bold bridge of gilt wire 128