Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/273

THE AMERICAN was not himself more often bored than he was often alarmed, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake than to take his intermissions always for absences or his absences always for holidays. What it was that entertained or that occupied him during some of his speechless sessions I shall not, however, undertake fully to say. The Marquise Urbain had once found occasion to declare to him that he reminded her, in company, of a swimming-master she had once had who would never himself go into the water and who yet, at the baths, en costume de ville, managed to control and direct the floundering scene without so much as getting splashed. He had so made her angry, she professed, when he turned her awkwardness to ridicule. Newman affected her in like manner as keeping much too dry: it was urgent for her that he should be splashed—otherwise what was he doing at the baths?—and she even hoped to get him into the water. We know in a general way that many things which were old stories to those about him had for him the sharp high note, but we should probably find a complete list of his new impressions surprising enough. He told Madame de Cintré stories, sometimes not brief, from his own repertory; he was full of reference to his own great country, over the greatness of which it seldom occurred to him that every one might n't, on occasion offered, more or less insatiably yearn; and he explained to her, in so discoursing, the play of a hundred of its institutions and the ingenuity of almost all its arrangements. Judging by the sequel, judging even by the manner in which she suffered his good 243