Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/302

THE AMERICAN being so different, which at first seemed a difficulty, a danger, began one day to seem to me a pleasure, a great pleasure. I was glad you were different. And yet if I had said so no one would have understood me. And I don't mean simply my family."

"They at least would have said I was a queer monster, eh?" he asked.

"They would have said I could never be happy with you—you were too different; and I would have said it was just because you were so different that I might be happy. But they would have given better reasons than I. My only reason—!" And she paused again.

But this time, before his golden sunrise, he felt the impulse to grasp at a rosy cloud. "Your only reason is that you love me!" he almost groaned for deep insistence; and he laid his two hands on her with a persuasion that she rose to meet. He let her feel as he drew her close, bending his face to her, the fullest force of his imposition; and she took it from him with a silent, fragrant, flexible surrender which—since she seemed to keep back nothing—affected him as sufficiently prolonged to pledge her to everything.

He came back the next day and in the vestibule, as he entered the house, encountered his friend Mrs. Bread. She was wandering about in honourable idleness and when his eyes fell upon her delivered to him straight one of her Wiltshire curtsies; then turning to the servant who had admitted him she said with a cognate respectability to which evidently a proper pronunciation of French had never had anything to add: "You may retire; I 'll have the honour of 272