The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) š
- Author: Henry James
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She was acquitting herself tonight as hostess, he could see, under some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to display. She was the American girl as he had originally found herā āfound her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then, he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kateās company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in herā āsuch as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the world be able to command; and he wouldnāt have known whether to see it in an extension or a contraction of āpersonality,ā taking it as he did most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort, from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near himā āand it had been as unmistakeable through dinnerā āthere was no getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of that advantage for the hourā āa brief fallacious makeweight to his pressureā āthat there were plenty of things left in which he must feel her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Millyās own, gave him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest. He had lived long enough to have been on occasion āliked,ā but it had never begun to be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter. It was a liking greater than Millyāsā āor it would be: he felt it in him to answer for that. So at all events he read the case while he noted that Kate was somehowā āfor Kateā āwanting in lustre. As a striking young presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been dressed tonight in the little black frock, superficially indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her wonderful entrance, under her auntās eyesā āhe had never forgotten itā āthe day of their younger friendās failure at Lancaster Gate. She was, in her accepted effacementā āit was actually her acceptance that made the beauty and repaired the damageā āunder her auntās eyes now; but whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
āDonāt you think her good enough now?ā Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference enlivened by native humoursā āthings quite in the line of old Venetian comedy. The girlās idea of music had been happyā āa real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general habit of mercy
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