Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/566

THE AMERICAN his club and that he had never wanted a better: a statement he felt the truth of when he was presently alone with her and even—or perhaps all the more—when she asked him what he had done on leaving her in the afternoon. "Well," he then replied, "I worked it off."

"Worked off the afternoon?"

"Yes, and a lot of other troublesome stuff."

"You struck me," she confessed, "as a man filled with some rather uncanny idea. I wondered if I were right to leave you so the prey of it, and whether I ought n't to have had you followed and watched."

This appeared to strike him with surprise. "Surely I did n't look as if I wanted to take life."

"I might have feared, if I had let myself go a little, that you were thinking of taking your own."

He breathed a long sigh of such apparent indifference to his own as would have ruled that out. "Well," he none the less after a moment went on, "I have got rid of about nine tenths of something that had become the biggest part of me. But I did that only by walking over to the Rue d'Enfer."

"You 've been then," she stared, "at the Carmelites?" And as he only met her eyes: "Trying to scale the wall?"

"Well, I thought of that—I measured the wall. I looked at it a long time. But it's too high—it's beyond me."

"That's right," she said. "Give it up."

"I have given it up. But on the spot there I took it all in."

She rested now her kindest eyes on him. "On the 536