The Beast in the Jungle

hat determined the speech that startled him in the course of their en-

counter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by

himself quite without intention-spoken as they lingered and slowly moved

together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends

an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying; the party of vis-

itors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to whom it was

his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to

luncheon. There had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest

of the original motive, a view ofWeatherend itself and the fine things, intrin-

sic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the place

almost famous; and the great rooms were so numerous that guests could

wander at their will, hang back from the principal group and in cases where

they took such matters with the last seriousness give themselves up to myste-

rious appreciations and measurements. There were persons to be observed,

singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with

their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with the em-

phasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two they either min-

gled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences of even deeper import,

so that there were aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the

3 HENRY JAMES

air of the "look round," previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or

quenches, as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition

at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found

himself, among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the pres-

ence of those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing.

The great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that

he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though

this impulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his compan-

ions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had

an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated.

It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting

with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance,

as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely by trou-

bling him rather pleasantly. It affected him as the sequel of something of

which he had lost the beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite wel-

comed it, as a continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which was

an interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware-yet

without a direct sign from her-that the young woman herself hadn't lost

the thread. She hadn't lost it, but she wouldn't give it back to him, he saw,

without some putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but

saw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the fact that at

the moment some accident of grouping brought them face to face he was

still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the

past would have had no importance. If it had had no importance he scarcely

knew why his actual impression of her should so seem to have so much; the

answer to which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be

leading for the moment one could but take things as they