Page:The Relentless City.djvu/210

200 no human being can be plucked up, like a plant, and have its roots buried in an alien soil; transplant it without a lump of its own earth, and it will infallibly wither. Nor had Bertie the least intention of making the attempt to transplant her like that. All along he had known that the American invasion would come to his house; he no more expected Amelie to give up her American milieu than she would have expected him to give up his English milieu. Indeed, when Mr. Palmer had presented him with a charming little bijou flat in New York, he had accepted the implication that he would pay from time to time a visit there with the same unquestioning acquiescence.

But now in his second visit he found to his dismay that, so far from ceasing to mind or notice the difference between the two peoples, the difference was accentuated as far as notice went, and doubled as far as minding went. His nerves, no doubt, were a little out of order, and what would have scarcely affected him in a serener frame of mind was in his present mood like the squeak of a slate pencil.

Yet behind all this, even as the sky extends for millions of miles behind a stormy and cloudy foreground, lay his feeling for Amelie herself. True, once in his life the passion for a woman had burned in him with so absorbing and fierce a flame that for more than two years afterwards he had soberly believed that he never again could feel any touch of passion for another. His adoration for Dorothy Emsworth had been his first grande passion; it was therefore probably his last, for such a thing does not come twice. Men whose lives are morally unedifying might doubt it, so he said to himself, but merely because they have never experienced it at all. To them has come a succession of strong desires, but this never. And though he did not give, nor did he make pretence of giving, to Amelie that which Mrs. Emsworth could find no use for, yet he gave her very honestly another way of love: he gave her very strong