The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) đ
- Author: Henry James
Book online «The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) đ». Author Henry James
The day or two passedâ âstretched to three days; and with the effect, extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washed but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the better effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without the particular scruple. It wouldnât have been meant for him by either of the women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was impossibleâ âthe being again denied; for it made him practically answerable, and answerable was what he wasnât. There was no neglect either in absence, inasmuch as, from the moment he didnât get in, the one message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health. Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden him he had only to waitâ âwhich he was actually helped to do by his feeling with the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days in themselves were anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted, the fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world about was broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and listened to the windâ âlistened also to tinkles of bells and watched for some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note never came; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When he wasnât at home he was in circulation again as he had been at the hour of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square with the herd of refugees; he raked the approaches and the cafĂ©s on the chance the brute, as he now regularly imaged him, might be still there. He could only be there, he knew, to be received afresh; and thatâ âone had but to think of itâ âwould be indeed stiff. He had gone, howeverâ âit was proved; though Densherâs care for the question either way only added to what was most acrid in the taste of his present ordeal. It all came round to what he was doing for Millyâ âspending days that neither relief nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abject for a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but sordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops and to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find himself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible meeting would produce? There recurred moments when in spite of everything he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on the third day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he wouldnât have budged for the world.
He thought of the two women, in their silence, at lastâ âhe at all events thought of Millyâ âas probably, for her reasons, now intensely wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything else, in the air; but he didnât care for them any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a proof of his not having stayed for the thingâ âthe agreeable, as it wereâ âthat Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium as actual too that Kate was, for
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