Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/274

THE AMERICAN faith to lay an apparent spell upon her attitude, she was mildly—oh mildly and inscrutably!—beguiled; but one would n't have been sure beforehand of the shade of her submission. As regards any communication she herself meanwhile made him he could n't nevertheless but guess that on the whole she "wanted" to make it. This was in so far an amendment to the portrait Mrs. Tristram had drawn of her.

He had been right at first in feeling her a little—or more than a little—proudly shy; her shyness, in a woman whose circumstances and tranquil beauty afforded every facility for sublime self-possession, was only a charm the more. For Newman it had lasted some time and had, even when it went, left something behind it that for a while performed the same office. Was this the uneasy secret of which Mrs. Tristram had had a glimpse, and of which, as of her friend's reserve, her high breeding and her profundity, she had given a sketch marked by outlines perhaps rather too emphatic? He supposed so, yet to find himself, as a result, wondering rather less what Madame de Cintré's secrets might consist of, and convinced rather more that secrets would be in themselves hateful and inconvenient things, things as depressing and detestable as inferior securities, for such a woman to have to lug, as he inwardly put it, round with her. She was a creature for the sun and the air, for no sort of hereditary shade or equivocal gloom; and her natural line was neither imposed reserve nor mysterious melancholy, but positive life, the life of the great world—his great world, not the grand monde as 244