Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/169

THE AMERICAN His visitor looked at him hard. "A situation—?"

Newman hesitated. "Well, I 'll tell you more about it when I know you better."

"Ah, you'll soon know me by heart!" the young man sighed as he departed.

During the next three weeks they met again several times and, without formally swearing an eternal friendship, fell, for their course of life, instinctively into step together. Valentin de Bellegarde was to Newman the typical, ideal Frenchman, the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was acquainted with these mystic fields. Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were quite duly pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary of all the agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of personal Honour; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible combinations of the human mixture, mentally to have foreshadowed it. No two parties to an alliance could have come to it from a wider separation, but it was what each brought out of the queer dim distance that formed the odd attraction for the other. 139