Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/545

THE AMERICAN link which bound him to a possible interest in the manufacture of cutlery was broken. He had no desire for an "inside view" of any successful enterprise whatever, and he would n't have given the smallest sum for the privilege of talking over the details of the most splendid business with the most original of managers.

One afternoon he had walked into the Park and was slowly threading his way through the human maze which fringes the Drive. This stream was no less dense, and Newman, as usual, marvelled at the strange dowdy figures he saw taking the air in some of the most shining conveyances. They reminded him of what he had read of Eastern and Southern countries, in which grotesque idols and fetiches were sometimes drawn out of their temples and carried abroad in golden chariots to be seen of the people. He noted a great many pretty cheeks beneath high-plumed hats as he squeezed his way through serried waves of crumpled muslin; and, sitting on little chairs at the base of the dull, massive English trees, he observed a number of quiet-eyed maidens who seemed only to remind him afresh that the magic of beauty had gone out of the world with the woman wrenched from him: to say nothing of other damsels whose eyes were not quiet and who struck him still more as a satire on possible consolation. He had been walking for some time when, directly in front of him, borne toward him by the summer breeze, he heard a few words uttered in the bright Parisian idiom his ears had begun to forget. The voice in which the words were spoken was a peculiar recall, and as he bent his 515