Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/68

 friends and strangely expansive with strangers. She overlooked her husband; overlooked him too much, for she had been perfectly at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love with a clever man who had eventually slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that the keener personage, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had had no appreciation of his keenness and that he had flattered her in thinking her touched. Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal ambitions but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was interesting from this sense she gave of her looking for her ideals by a lamp of strange and fitful flame. She was full—both for good and for ill—of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.

Newman was fond, in all circumstances, of the society of women; and now that he was out of his native element and deprived of his habitual interests he turned to it for compensation. He took a great fancy to Mrs. Tristram; she frankly repaid it, and after their first meeting he passed a great many hours in her drawing-room. Two or three long talks had made them fast friends. Newman's manner with women was peculiar, and it required some diligence on a lady's part to discover that he admired her. He had no gallantry in the usual sense of the term; no compliments, no graces, no speeches. Fond enough of a large pleasantry in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa beside a member of the softer sex without feeling that such situations appealed, like beautiful views, or 38