Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/167

THE AMERICAN "Well then," said Newman, "you're very well fixed. You've got pleasure in the present and paradise in the future: what do you complain of?"

"It's a part of one's pleasure to complain. There's something in your own situation that rubs me up. You're the first man about whom I've ever found myself saying 'Oh, if I were he—!' It's singular, but so it is. I've known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain, yet they've never disturbed my inward peace. You've got something it worries me to have missed. It's not money, it's not even brains—though evidently yours have been excellent for your purpose. It's not your superfluous stature, though I should have rather liked to be a couple of inches taller. It's a sort of air you have of being imperturbably, being irremoveably and indestructibly (that's the thing!) at home in the world. When I was a boy my father assured me it was by just such an air that people recognised a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He did n't advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me because I think I've always had the feeling it represents. My place in life had been made for me and it seemed easy to occupy. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have made and sold articles of vulgar household use—you strike me, in a fashion of your own, as a man who stands about at his ease and looks straight over ever so many high walls. I seem to see you move everywhere like a big 137