Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/221

THE AMERICAN would have to contend, and he became sensible of their intensity. He wished to make some answering manifestation, to stretch himself out at his own length, to sound a note at the uttermost end of his scale. It must be added that if this impulse was neither vicious nor malicious, it was yet by no means unattended by the play in him of his occasional disposition to ironic adventure. He hated the idea of shocking people, he respected the liability to be shocked. But there were impressions that threw him back, after all, on his own measures of proportion. "Paris," he presently remarked, "is a very good place for people who take a great deal of stock, as we say, in their location, and want to be very much aware of it all the time; or it's a very good place if your family has been settled here for a long time and you've made acquaintances and got your relations round you; or if you've got a big house like this and a wife and children and mother and sister—everything right there. I don't like that way that prevails in many of your districts of people's living all in rooms door to door with each other. But I'm not, as I may put it, a natural, a real inspired loafer. I'm a poor imitation and it goes against the grain. My business habits are too deep-seated. Then I have n't any house to call my own or anything in the way of a family. My sisters are five thousand miles away, my mother died when I was pretty small, and I have n't what a man has when he has taken the regular way to get it—if I express myself clearly; and I often miss that pleasantness very much. So you see I'm sometimes rather conscious 191