Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/171

THE AMERICAN The charming Count, like most of his countrymen, hid none of his lights under a bushel and made little of a secret of the more interesting passages of his personal history. He had inevitably a vast deal to say about women, and could frequently indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. "Oh, the women, the women, and the things they've made me do!" he would exclaim with a wealth of reference. "C'est égal, of all the follies and stupidities I've committed for them there is n't one I would have missed!" On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to make it shine in the direct light of one's own experience had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully-developed human character. But his friend's confidences greatly amused and rarely displeased him, for the garden of the young man's past appeared to have begun from the earliest moment to bloom with rare flowers, amid which memory was as easy as a summer breeze. "I really think," he once said, "that I'm not more depraved than most of my contemporaries. They're joliment depraved, my contemporaries!" He threw off wonderfully pretty things about his female friends and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that his curiosity had survived the ordeal. "But you're not to take that as advice," he added, "for as an authority I must be misleading. I'm prejudiced in their favour; I'm a sentimental—in other words a donkey." Newman listened with an uncommitted smile and 141