The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) đ
- Author: Henry James
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He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed he was at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to the south. That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because there had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finally talked, an instant recognition of his necessary course. Nothing was open to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than the influence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself that possessed him. Her complications, which had fairly, with everything else, an awful soundâ âwhat were they, a thousand times over, but his own? His present business was to see that they didnât escape an hour longer taking their proper place in his life. He accordingly would have held his course hadnât it suddenly come over him that he had just lied to Mrs. Lowderâ âa term it perversely eased him to keep usingâ âeven more than was necessary. To what church was he going, to what church, in such a state of his nerves, could he go?â âhe pulled up short again, as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowderâs carriage, to ask it. And yet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word. He was just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and he bethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He had but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon before it. At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was reallyâ âas it struck himâ âconsecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid serviceâ âthe flocking crowd told of itâ âwhich glittered and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of organ and choir. It didnât match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory in short, to make him right, would do.
IVThe difference was thus that the dusk of afternoonâ âdusk thick from an early hourâ âhad gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condripâs door. He had gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt independently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while, closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the night. Before doing this indeed he had writtenâ âit was the first thing he didâ âa short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place, he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger. He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return with a gage of delivery. When at four oâclock he was face to face with Kate in Mrs. Condripâs small drawing-room he found to his relief that his notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extent prepared; which simplified a littleâ âif a little, at the present pass, counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen her. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her auntâs pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied ceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs. Condripâs interior, even by this best view of it and though not flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt. Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished strangerâ âa stranger to the little Chelsea streetâ âwho was making the best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a stranger in it than she.
A part of the queernessâ âthis was to come to him in glimpsesâ âsprang from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were, for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother. Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly having a sense of Kateâs own quality thus promptly to see them in reference to it. But that Densher had
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