Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/277

THE AMERICAN had done some one to death—all of course from a high sense of duty."

"How can you be so dreadful?" Mrs. Tristram had luxuriously sighed.

"I'm not dreadful. I am speaking of her favourably."

"Pray what will you say then when you want to be severe?"

"I shall keep my severity for some one else—say for that prize donkey of a Marquis. There's a man I can't swallow, mix the drink as I will."

"And what has he done?"

"I can't quite make out, but it's something very nice of its kind—I mean of a kind elegantly sneaking and fastidiously base; not redeemed as in his mother's case by a fine little rage of passion at some part of the business. If he has never committed murder he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while some one else was committing it."

In spite of this free fancy, which indeed struck his friend as, for a specimen of American humour, exceptionally sardonic, Newman did his best to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication with M. de Bellegarde. So long as he was in personal contact with people he disliked extremely to have anything to forgive them, and was capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the working of the relation) to assume them to be of a human substance and a social elasticity not alien to his own. He did his best to treat the Marquis as practically akin to him; he believed honestly, moreover, that he could n't in reason be such a confounded fool as he 247