Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/530

THE AMERICAN a large grotesque in a vulgar system of chamber-decoration. "I suppose you know that, as regards yourself, a course so confessedly vindictive—vindictive in respect to your discomfiture—won't do at all."

"How do you mean it won't do?"

"Why, of course you utterly damn yourself. But I suppose that's in your programme. You propose to throw at us this horrible ordure that you've raked together, and you believe, you hope, that some of it may stick. We know naturally it can't," explained the Marquis in a tone of conscious lucidity; "but you take the chance and are willing at any rate to show that you yourself have dirty hands."

"That's a good comparison; at least half of it is," said Newman. "I take the chance of something sticking. But as regards my hands, they're clean. I've taken the awful thing up with my finger-tips."

M. de Bellegarde looked a moment into his hat. "All our friends are quite with us. They would have done exactly as we've done."

"I shall believe that when I hear them say it. Meanwhile I shall think better of human nature."

The Marquis looked into his hat again. "My poor perverse sister was extremely fond of her father. If she knew of the existence of the few base words—at once mad and base—of which you propose to make this scandalous use, she would require of you, proudly, for his sake, to give them up to her, and she would destroy them on the spot."

"Very possibly," Newman rejoined. "But it's exactly what she won't know. I was in that hideous place yesterday, and I know what she 's doing. Lord of 500