Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/354

THE AMERICAN shan't trouble him any more. Only I'm very happy. I can't stand still here. Please take my arm and we'll go for a walk."

He led Mrs. Tristram from one room to another, where, scattering wide glances and soft, sharp comments, she reminded him of the pausing wayfarer who studies the contents of the confectioner's window, with platonic discriminations, through a firm plate of glass. But he made vague answers; he scarcely heard her; his thoughts were elsewhere. They were lost in the vastness of this attested truth of his having come out where he wanted. His momentary consciousness of perhaps too broad a grin passed away, and he felt, the next thing, almost solemnly quiet. Yes, he had "got there," and now it was, all-powerfully, to stay. These prodigies of gain were in a general way familiar to him, but the sense of what he had "made" by an anxious operation had never been so deep and sweet. The lights, the flowers, the music, the "associations," vague and confused to him, yet hovering like some odour of dried spices, something far-away and, as he had hinted to the Marquis, Mongolian; the splendid women, the splendid jewels, the strangeness even of the universal sense of a tongue that seemed the language of society as Italian was the language of opera: these things were all a gage of his having worked, from the old first years, under some better star than he knew. Yet if he showed again and again so many of his fine strong teeth, it was not tickled vanity that pulled the exhibition-string: he had no wish to be pointed at with the finger or to be 324