Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/452

THE AMERICAN light of his injury that the weight of his past endurance seemed so heavy; his current irritation had not been so great, merged as it was in his vision of the cloudless blue that overarched his more intimate relation. But now his sense of outrage was deep, rancorous and ever-present; he felt himself as swindled as he had been confiding. As for his friend's spiritual position, it moved him but to dismal mystification; it struck him with a kind of awe, and the fact that he was powerless to understand it or feel the reality of its motives only made it a deadlier oppression. He had never let the fact of her religious faith trouble him; Catholicism was only a name to him, and to express a mistrust of her forms of worship would have implied that he had other and finer ones to offer: which was as little possible as might be. If such flawless white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil they but attested its richness. But it was one thing to be a Catholic and another to turn nun—on your hands! There was something lugubriously comical in the way Newman's thoroughly contemporaneous optimism was confronted with this dusky old-world expedient. To see a woman made for him and for motherhood to his children juggled away in this tragic travesty—it was a thing to rub one's eyes over, a nightmare, an extravagance, a hoax. But the hours passed without disproving anything, passed leaving him only the aftertaste of the vehemence with which he had held her to his heart. He remembered her words and her looks—he lived through again the sense of her short submission; he turned them over and tried to make them square with the saving of something from his 422