Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/163

THE AMERICAN as being—like fish and fowl—too different to quarrel."

"Oh, I never quarrel," said Newman rather shortly.

"You mean you just shoot? Well, I notify you that till I'm shot," his visitor declared, "I shall have had a greater sense of safety with you than I have perhaps ever known in any relation of life. And as a sense of danger is clearly a thing impossible to you, we shall therefore be all right."

With the preamble embodied in these remarks he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their heels on Newman's glowing hearth they heard the small hours of the morning strike larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegarde was by his own confession at all times a great chatterer, and on this occasion the habit of promptness of word and tone was on him almost as a fever. It was a tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favour by their attentions, and, as his real confidence was as rare as his general surface was bright, he had a double reason for never fearing his friendship could be importunate. Late blossom though he might be, moreover, of an ancient stem, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his nature neither visible guards nor alarms, but was as muffled in sociability and urbanity as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentin was by the measure of the society about him a gentilhomme of purest strain, and his rule of life, so far as it was definite, had been to keep up the character. This, it seemed to him, might agreeably engage a young 133