Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/441

THE AMERICAN "Nothing. Nothing that you can understand. And now that I've given you up I must n't complain of her to you."

"That's no reasoning!" cried Newman. "Complain of her, on the contrary, for all you're worth. To whom on God's earth but to me? Tell me all about it, frankly and trustfully, as you ought, and we 'll talk it over so satisfactorily that you 'll keep your plighted faith."

Madame de Cintré looked down some moments fixedly; at last she raised her eyes. "One good at least has come of this: I've made you judge me more fairly. You thought of me in a way that did me great honour; I don't know why you had taken it into your head. But it left me no loophole for escape—no chance to be the common weak creature I am. It was not my fault; I warned you from the first. But I ought to have warned you more. I ought to have convinced you that I was doomed to disappoint you. But I was, in a way, too proud. You see what my superiority amounts to, I hope!" she went on, raising her voice with a tremor that even then and there he found all so inconsequently sweet. "I 'm too proud to be honest, I 'm not too proud to be faithless. I'm timid and cold and selfish. I'm afraid of being uncomfortable."

"And you call marrying me uncomfortable?" he stared.

She flushed as with the sense of being only shut up in her pain, and seemed to say that if begging his pardon in words had that effect of an easy condition for her she might at least thus mutely express her 411