Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/204

THE AMERICAN being already subject to that tie!—which must be awful, I admit, when it's only a grind. Is it because you've been unhappy in marriage? That 's all the more reason. Is it because your family exert a pressure on you, interfere with you or worry you? That's still another reason: you ought to be perfectly free, and marriage will make you so. I don't say anything against your family—understand that!" added Newman with an eagerness which might have made a perspicacious witness smile. "Whatever way you feel about them is the right way, and anything you should wish me to do to make myself agreeable to them I 'll do as well as I know how. They may put me through what they like—I guess I shall hold out!"

She rose again and came to the fire near which he had hovered. The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it had submitted itself with a kind of grace in which there might have been indeed a kind of art. She had the air of a woman who had stepped across the frontier of friendship and looks round her a little bewildered to find the spaces larger than those marked in her customary chart. A certain checked and controlled exaltation played through the charm of her dignity. "I won't refuse to see you again, because much of what you've said has given me pleasure. But I will see you only on this condition: that you say nothing more in the same way for a long long time."

"What do you mean by 'long long'—?"

"Well, I mean six months. It must be a solemn promise."

"Very good; I promise." 174