Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/562

THE AMERICAN she went on: "You're not so good a man as I thought. You're more—you're more—"

"More what?"

"More unreconciled."

"Good God!" he cried; "do you expect me to forgive?"

"No, not that. I've not forgiven, so of course you can't. But you might magnificently forget. You've a worse temper about it than I should have expected. You look wicked—you look dangerous."

"I may be dangerous," he said; "but I'm not wicked. No, I'm not wicked." And he got up to go. She asked him to come back to dinner, but he answered that he could n't face a convivial occasion, even as a solitary guest. Later in the evening, if he should be able, he would look in.

He walked away through the city, beside the Seine and over it, and took the direction of the Rue d'Enfer. The day had the softness of early spring, but the weather was grey and humid. He found himself in a part of Paris that he little knew—a region of convents and prisons, of streets bordered by long dead walls and traversed by few frequenters. At the intersection of two of these streets stood the house of the Carmelites—a dull, plain edifice with a blank, high-shouldered defence all round. From without he could see its upper windows, its steep roof and its chimneys. But these things revealed no symptoms of human life; the place looked dumb, deaf, inanimate. The pale, dead, discoloured wall stretched beneath it far down the empty side-street—a vista without a human figure. He stood there a long time; there were no 532