Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/241

THE AMERICAN was in their view of that picturesque grace, and Newman would, to an appreciable degree, have sentimentally suffered from not being able to keep Monsieur Nioche before him as he had first seen him. He was, to an extent he never fully revealed, a collector of impressions as romantically concrete, even when profane, as the blest images and sanctified relics of one of the systematically devout, and he at bottom liked as little to hear anything he had picked up with the hand of the spirit pronounced unauthentic. I don't quite remember what Virginius did," he presently pursued, "and I don't say for certain that my old friend would shoot. He does n't affect me—no—as a shooting man. But I guess he would n't want to make very much out of anything."

"Then he'll be very different," Valentin laughed, "from any of the rest of his species! Why, my dear fellow, we all here in Paris want to make as much as possible out of everything. That's how we differ, I conceive, from the people of your country: the objects of your exploitation appear to be fewer, and above all of fewer kinds. I don't mind telling you," he declared in the same tone, "that I don't see the end of what I might be capable of making out of this."

"Of 'this'—?"

"Of the relation of Monsieur Nioche to his daughter, and of the relation of his daughter to—well, to as many other persons as you like!"

"I shan't at all like you to be one of them," Newman still gravely returned. "I did n't ask you to come round with me just to set you after her."

The young man appeared for an instant 211