Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/560

THE AMERICAN see if it could content itself to remain undone. Well, clearly, it could n't content itself; it kept pulling at his heartstrings and thumping at his reason; it murmured in his ears and hovered perpetually before his eyes. It interposed between all new resolutions and their fulfilment; it was a stubborn ghost dumbly entreating to be laid. On the doing of that all other doing depended.

One day toward the end of the winter, after a long interval, he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, who appeared to have been moved by a charitable desire to amuse and distract her correspondent. She gave him much Paris gossip, talked of General Packard and Miss Kitty Upjohn, enumerated the new plays at the theatres and enclosed a note from her husband, who had gone down to spend a month at Nice. Then came her signature and after this her postscript. The latter consisted of these few lines: "I heard three days since from my friend the Abbé Aubert that Claire de Cintré last week received the veil at the Carmelites. It was on her twenty-ninth birthday, and she took the name of her patroness, Saint Veronica. Sœur Véronique has a lifetime before her!"

This letter reached him in the morning; in the evening he started for Paris. His wound began to ache with its first fierceness, and during his long bleak journey he had no company but the thought of the new Sister's "lifetime"—every one's sister but his!—passed within walls on whose outer side only he might stand. Well, for that station he would live, if it was to be spoken of as life; he would fix himself in 530