Henry James

“ Eustace was looking at him hard, with a terribly untender gaze. It made me sick. I was on the point of rushing in and adjuring Eustace by the truth. But suddenly Mr. Cope raised his eyes and exchanged with the boy a look with which he seemed to read his very soul. He waved his hand in the air as if to dismiss fond patience.
"If you were to see yourself as I see you," he said, "you would be vastly amazed; you would know your absurd appearance. Young as you are, you are rotten with arrogance and pride. What would you say if I were to tell you that, least of men, you have reason to be proud? ”

“ After a couple of days of sunshine the rain came back again, to our hero's infinite annoyance, and this time it lasted several days. The garden lay dripping and desolate; its charm had quite departed. These days passed gloomily for Benvolio; he decided that rainy weather, in summer, in town, was intolerable. He began to think of the Countess again. He was sure that over her broad lands the summer sun was shining. He saw them, in envious fancy, studded with joyous Watteau groups, feasting and making music under the shade of ancestral beeches. What a charming life! ”

“ But for poor Theodore to-night there was nothing but scowls and frowns, and barely a civil inquiry about his health. But poor Theodore is not such a fool, either; he'll not die of a snubbing; I never said he was a weakling. Once he fairly saw from what quarter the wind blew, he bore the master's brutality with the utmost coolness and gallantry. Can it be that Mr. Sloane really wishes to drop him? The delicious old brute! He understands favor and friendship only as a selfish rapture—a reaction, an infatuation, an act of aggressive, exclusive patronage. ”

“ For a while this answer satisfied her, but as the winter went by she began to wonder whether there was not such a thing as a man being in love with two women at once. During many months that followed Benvolio led a kind of double life. Sometimes it charmed him and gave him an inspiring sense of personal power. He haunted the domicile of his gentle neighbors, and drank deep of philosophy, history, and all the garnered wisdom of the ages; and he made appearances as frequent in the Countess's drawing-room, where he played his part with magnificent zest and ardor. ”

“ Benvolio raged inwardly at the cruel limitations of the human mind, and declared it was a great outrage that a man should not be personally able to do everything he could imagine doing. I hardly know how she contrived it, but the Countess was at this time a more engaging woman than she had ever been. Her beauty acquired an ampler and richer cast, and she had a manner of looking at you, as she slowly turned away, which had lighted a hopeless flame in many a youthful breast. Benvolio one day felt in the mood for finishing his comedy, and the Countess and her friends acted it. ”

“ If he were not destined to become a high priest among moralists, he might be a prince among connoisseurs. He plays his part then, artistically, with taste, with relish—with all the finesse of his delicate fancy. How can Mr. Sloane fail to believe that he possesses a paragon? He is no such fool as to misconceive a belle âme when a belle âme comes in his way. He confidentially assured me this morning that Theodore has the most beautiful mind in the world, but that it's a pity he's so simple as not to suspect it. If he only doesn't ruin him with his flattery! ”

“ But in Theodore I have so firm a friend that I shall have a long row to hoe if I ever find it needful to make him forswear his devotion—abjure his admiration. He admires me—that's absolute; he takes my moral infirmities for the eccentricities of genius, and they only impart an extra flavor—a haut goût—to the richness of my charms. Nevertheless, I can see that he is disappointed. I have even less to show, after this lapse of years, than he had hoped. Heaven help us! little enough it must strike him as being. What an essential absurdity there is in our being friends at all. ”

“ She would look at him always with her doting smile, and with a little glow of melancholy in her eyes—a faint tribute to some shadowy chance that even her Eustace might reckon without his host. She would shake her head tenderly, or lean it on his shoulder and murmur, "Who knows, who knows? It's perhaps as foolish, my son, to try and forecast happiness as to attempt to take the measure of misery. We know them each when they come. Whatever comes to us, at all events, we shall meet it together." ”

“ After this she gave her ball to her country neighbors, and Benvolio danced, to a boisterous, swinging measure, with a dozen ruddy beauties dressed in the fashions of the year before last. The Countess danced with the lusty male counterparts of these damsels, but she found plenty of chances to watch Benvolio. Toward the end of the evening she saw him looking grave and bored, with very much such a frown in his forehead as when he had sat staring at the fire that last day in her boudoir. She said to herself for the hundredth time that he was the oddest of mortals. ”

“ One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently occupied; one was always idle (it might be concluded) when one's occupations had not a high aim. One was idle therefore when one was working simply for one's self. Curiosity for curiosity's sake, art for art's sake, these were essentially broken-winded steeds. Ennui was at the end of everything that did not entangle us somehow with human life. To get entangled, therefore, pondered Benvolio, should be the wise man's aim. Poor Benvolio had to ponder all this, because, as I say, he was a poet and not a man of action. ”

“ Sloane's disposal. He actually runs after me; he devours me; he makes a fool of himself, and is trying hard to make one of me. I find that he will stand—that, in fact, he actually enjoys—a certain kind of humorous snubbing. He likes anything that will tickle his fancy, impart a flavor to our relations, remind him of his old odds and ends of novels and memoirs. I have fairly stepped into Theodore's shoes, and done—with what I feel in my bones to be vastly inferior skill and taste—all the reading, writing, condensing, expounding, transcribing and advising that he has been accustomed to do. ”

“ And then I declared that I must go up and look at poor Theodore.
The bonhomme still kept my hands. "I wish very much," he said, "that I could get you to love me as well as you do poor Theodore."
"Ah, don't talk about love, Mr. Sloane. I'm no lover."
"Don't you love your friend?"
"Not as he deserves."
"Nor as he loves you, perhaps?"
"He loves me, I'm afraid, far more than I deserve."
"Well, Max," my host pursued, "we can be good friends, all the same. We don't need a hocus-pocus of false sentiment. We are men, aren't we?—men of sublime good sense." ”

“ But they rendered the Countess eminent service: she gained by comparison, and Benvolio began to miss her. All that other charming women were who led the life of the world (as it is called) the Countess was in a superior, in a perfect degree; she was the ripest fruit of a high civilization; her companions and rivals, beside her, had but a pallid bloom, an acrid savor. Benvolio had a relish in all things for the best, and he found himself breathing sighs under the Countess's darkened windows. ”

“ He was her only companion, and when they were established in the castle the hospitality extended to the resident gentry was less abundant than had been promised. Benvolio, however, did not complain of the absence of it, because, for the week or so, he was passionately in love with his hostess. They took long sleigh-rides and drank deep of the poetry of winter. The blue shadows on the snow, the cold amber lights in the west, the leafless twigs against the snow-charged sky, all gave them extraordinary pleasure. ”

“ Was it divine philosophy that made Scholastica charming, or was it she that made philosophy divine? I cannot relate everything that came to pass between these young people, and I must leave a great deal to your imagination. The summer waned, and when the autumnal shadow began to gnaw the bright edge of the days, the quiet couple in the old gray house had expanded to a talkative trio. For Benvolio the days had passed very fast; the trio had talked of so many things. He had spent many an hour in the garden with the young girl, strolling in the weedy paths, or resting on a moss-grown bench. ”

“ Her light-brown hair was, naturally enough, dressed with consummate art, and the character of her beauty being suggestive of purity and gentleness, she looked (her black silk dress apart) like a Madonna who should have been coiffée in the Rue de la Paix. What a delightful person for a barber's wife! I thought; and I saw her sitting in the little front shop at the desk and taking the money with a gracious smile from the gentlemen who had been having their whiskers trimmed in the inner sanctuary. ”

“ Benvolio perceived that she was not in the least a woman of genius. The passion for knowledge, of its own motion, would never have carried her far. But she had a clear, tranquil, natural mind, which gave back an exact, definite image of everything that was presented to it; the sort of intelligence, Benvolio said, which had been, as a minimum, every one's portion in the golden age, and would be again the golden mean in the millennium. ”

“ Agatha kept her word; she said nothing to Diana about her interview. The young Americans came out and sat upon the shore the next day, and the next, and the next, and Agatha watched intently for Mr. Longstaff's're-appearance. But she watched in vain; day after day he was absent, and his absence confirmed his sad prediction. She thought all this a wonderful thing to happen to a woman, and as she glanced askance at her beautiful companion, she was almost irritated at seeing her sit there so careless and serene, while a poor young man was dying, as one might say, of love for her. ”

“ When the clergyman had gone he asked Diana when he might see her again.
"Never!" she said, with her strange smile. And she added—"I shall not live long now."
He kissed her face, but he was obliged to leave her. He gave Agatha an anxious look as if he wished to say something to her, but she preferred not to listen to him. After this Diana sank rapidly. The next day, Reginald Longstaff came back and insisted upon seeing Agatha.
"Why should she die?" he asked. "I want her to live." ”

“ He recommended her to remain in Rome, as the climate exactly suited her complaint. Agatha's second desire was to see Mr. Longstaff, who had appealed to her, she reflected, in the day of his own tribulation, and whom she therefore had a right to approach at present. She disbelieved, too, that the passion which led him to take that extraordinary step at Nice was extinct; such passions as that never died. If he had made no further attempt to see Diana it was because he believed that she was still as cold as when she turned away from his death-bed. ”

“ This was its maximum; no smile could do more, and Benvolio desired nothing better. Yet I cannot say he was in love with the young girl; he only liked her. But he liked her, no doubt, as a man likes a thing but once in his life. As he knew her better the oddity of her learning quite faded away; it seemed delightfully natural, and he only wondered why there were not more women of the same pattern. Scholastica had imbibed the wine of science instead of her mother's milk. ”