Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/556

THE AMERICAN to sponge it out of his life for ever. The thing seemed a possibility; he could n't feel it doubtless as keenly as some people, and it scarce struck him as worth while to flap his wings very hard to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here he stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played strange shadows and confused signs. Was it a thinkable plan, that of carrying out his life as he would have directed had Madame de Cintré been left to him?—that of making it a religion to do nothing she would have disliked? In this certainly was no sacrifice; but there was a pale, oblique ray of inspiration. It would be lonely entertainment—a good deal like a man's talking to himself in the mirror for want of better company. Yet the idea yielded him several half-hours dumb exaltation as he sat, his hands in his pockets and his legs outstretched, over the relics of an expensively bad dinner, in the undying English twilight. If, however, his financial imagination was dead he felt no contempt for the surviving actualities begotten by it. He was glad he had been prosperous and had been a great operator rather than a small; he was extremely glad he was rich. He felt no impulse to sell all he had and give to the poor, or to retire into meditative economy and asceticism. He was glad he was rich and tolerably young; if it was possible to have inhaled too fondly the reek of the market, it was yet a gain still to have time for experiments in other air. Come then, what air should it now be? Ah, again and again, he could taste but one 526