Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/159

THE AMERICAN over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was but middling high and of robust and agile aspect. Valentin de Bellegarde, his host was afterwards to learn, had a mortal dread of not keeping the robustness down sufficiently to keep the agility up; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short a story as he said, to afford an important digression. He rode and fenced and practised gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and you could n't congratulate him on his appearance without making him turn pale at your imputation of its increase. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and enquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his fair open eyes, completely void, as they were in his case, of introspection, and in the fine freshness of his smile, which was like a gush of crystalline water. The charm of his face was above all in its being intensely, being frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. You might have seen it in the form of a bell with the long pull dangling in the young man's conscious soul; at a touch of the silken cord the silver sound would fill the air. There was something in this quick play which assured you he was not economising his consciousness, not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre and was keeping open house. When he flared into gaiety it was the movement of a hand that in emptying a cup turns 129