Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/242

THE AMERICAN. "Do you object then to her having engaged my enlightened curiosity?"

Newman considered. "Well, no—since, from the moment I recognise she 'll never deliver my goods I don't quite see where I stand or how I can improve her."

"Oh, you certainly can't improve her!" Valentin gaily cried.

Newman looked at him a moment. "I should like then to improve you. I guess at any rate you had better leave her alone."

"Oh, oh, oh!" his companion exclaimed, at this, with an accent that made him pull up. "Do you mean, my dear fellow, that you warn me off?"

They had stopped a minute before, and he stood there staring. "Hanged if I don't believe you suppose I'm afraid of you!"

Valentin had given a cock to his moustache, and he stroked it an instant, meeting this exclamation with a glance of some ambiguity and a smile just slightly strained. "Oh, I should n't put it that way: you don't even yet know me enough to fear me! Which gives you the advantage—for you've yourself attitudes that, I confess, make me tremble. I think you're afraid, at most," he continued, "of my bad example."

Newman had again—for he had had it before—a strange fine sense of something he would have called, in relation to this brilliant friend, the waste of animadversion. It was somehow one with the accepted economic need of keeping him pleasantly in view. Even to argue with him was somehow to misuse a 212