Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/502

THE AMERICAN this. Can I get near her—even if I don't see her? Can I look through a grating, or some such thing, at the place where she is?"

It is said that all women love a lover, and Mrs. Bread's sense of the pre-established harmony which kept servants in their "place," even as planets in their orbits (not that she had ever consciously likened herself to a planet), barely availed to temper the maternal melancholy with which she leaned her head on one side and gazed at her new employer. She probably felt for the moment as if, forty years before, she had held him also in her arms. "That would n't help you, sir. It would only make her seem further away."

"I want to go there, at all events," he returned. "The Avenue de Messine, you say? And what is it they call themselves?"

"Carmelites—whatever it means!" said Mrs. Bread.

"I shall remember that."

She hesitated a moment and then: "It's my duty to tell you this—that the convent has a chapel and that respectable persons are admitted on Sunday to the mass. You don't see the poor creatures in their prison or their tomb, but I'm told you can hear them sing. It's a wonder they have any heart for singing! Some Sunday I shall make bold to go. It seems to me I should know her voice in fifty."

Newman thanked her, while he held her hand, with a stare through which he, for a good reason, failed to see her. "If any one can get in I will." A moment later she proposed deferentially to retire, but he checked her, pressing on her grasp a lighted candle. 472