Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/220

THE AMERICAN "Well," our friend continued, "the life of the people, for one thing, interests me. Your people are very taking. But economically, technically, as it were, manufactures are what I care most about."

"Those—a—products have been your speciality?"

"I can't say I have had any speciality. My speciality has been to accumulate the largest convenient competency in the shortest possible time." Newman made this last remark very designedly and deliberately; he wished to open the way, should it be necessary, to an authoritative statement of his means.

M. de Bellegarde laughed agreeably. "I hope you enjoy the sense of that success."

"Oh, one has still, at my age, the sense also of what's left to do. I'm not so very old," our hero candidly explained.

"Well, Paris is a very good place to spend a fortune. I wish you all the advantages of yours." And M. de Bellegarde drew forth his gloves and began to put them on.

Newman for a few moments watched him sliding his fair, fat hands into the pearly kid, and as he did so his feelings took a singular turn. M. de Bellegarde's good wishes seemed to flutter down on him from the cold upper air with the soft, scattered movement of a shower of snowflakes. Yet he was not irritated; he did n't feel that he was being patronised; he was conscious of no especial impulse to introduce a discord into so noble a harmony. Only he felt himself suddenly in personal contact with the forces with which his so valued backer had told him that he 190