Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/559

THE AMERICAN questions which, like those of an eminent physician enquiring for particular symptoms, proved he was master of his subject; but he made no comments and gave no directions. He not only puzzled all the prominent men, but was himself surprised at the extent of his indifference. As it seemed only to increase he made an effort to combat it; he tried to take hold and to recover, as they said, his spring. But the ground was inelastic and the issues dead; do what he would he somehow could n't believe in them. Sometimes he began to fear there was something the matter with him, that he had suffered, unwitting, some small horrid cerebral lesion or nervous accident, and that the end of his strong activities had come. This idea for a while hung about him and haunted him. A hopeless, helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to himself—this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him. In his anxious idleness he came back from San Francisco to New York, where he sat for three days in the lobby of his hotel and looked out through a huge wall of plate glass at the unceasing stream of pretty girls who wore their clothes as with the American accent and undulated past with little parcels nursed against their neat figures. At the end of three days he returned to San Francisco and, having arrived there, wished he had stayed away. He had nothing to do, his occupation had gone, had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life. He had nothing to do here, he sometimes said to himself; but there was something beyond the ocean he was still to do; something he had left undone experimentally and speculatively, to 529