Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/339

THE AMERICAN to dress your wife. Claire's an angel, yes, but her bows, already, are—well, quite of another world!"

Madame de Cintré was calmly content before society, but her lover had the felicity of feeling that before him, when society was absent, her sense of security overflowed. She said charming and tender things. "I take no pleasure in you. You never give me a chance to scold you, to correct you. I bargained for that; I expected to enjoy it. But you won't do anything wrong or queer or dreadful, and yet you won't even look as if you were trying to do right. You 're easier than we are, you 're easier than I am, and I quite see that you 've reasons, of some sort, that are as good as ours. It's dull for me therefore," she smiled, and it 's rather disappointing, not to have anything to show you or to tell you or to teach you, anything that you don't seem already quite capable of knowing and doing and feeling. What's left of all the good one was going to do you? It's very stupid, there's no excitement for me; I might as well be marrying some one—well, some one not impossible."

"I'm afraid I'm as impossible as I know how to be, and that it's all the worst I can do in the time," Newman would say in answer to this. "Kindly make the best of any inconvenience." He assured her that he would never visit on her any sense of her own deficiencies; he would treat her at least as if she were perfectly satisfactory. "Oh," he then broke out, "if you only knew how exactly you're what I coveted! I'm beginning to understand why I wanted it; the having it makes all the difference that I expected. 309