Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/56

 his disposal had ceased to be solely his whetted, knife-edged resolution and his lively perception of ends and means. Yet these were his real arms, and exertion and action as natural to him as respiration: a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the elastic soil of great States of his option. His experience moreover had been as wide as his capacity; necessity had in his fourteenth year taken him by his slim young shoulders and pushed him into the street to earn that night's supper. He had not earned it, but he had earned the next night's, and afterwards, whenever he had had none, it was because he had gone without to use the money for something else, a keener pleasure or a finer profit. He had turned his hand, with his brain in it, to many things; he had defied example and precedent and probability, had adventured almost to madness and escaped almost by miracles, drinking alike of the flat water, when not the rank poison, of failure, and of the strong wine of success.

A born experimentalist, he had always found something to enjoy in the direct pressure of fate even when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt of the mediæval monk. At one time defeat had seemed inexorably his portion; ill-luck had become his selfish bed-fellow, and whatever he touched had turned to ashes out of which no gleaming particle could be raked. His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the world's affairs had come to him once when he felt his head all too bullyingly pummelled; there seemed to him something stronger in life than his personal, intimate will. But the mysterious something could only be a demon as personal as himself, and he 26