The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
Book online «The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) đ». Author Henry James
Behind the glass lurked the whole history of the relation she had so fairly flattened her nose against it to penetrateâ âthe glass Mrs. Verver might, at this stage, have been frantically tapping, from within, by way of supreme, irrepressible entreaty. Maggie had said to herself complacently, after that last passage with her stepmother in the garden of Fawns, that there was nothing left for her to do and that she could thereupon fold her hands. But why wasnât it still left to push further and, from the point of view of personal pride, grovel lower?â âwhy wasnât it still left to offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting to him their friendâs anguish and convincing him of her need?
She could thus have translated Mrs. Ververâs tap against the glass, as I have called it, into fifty forms; could perhaps have translated it most into the form of a reminder that would pierce deep. âYou donât know what it is to have been loved and broken with. You havenât been broken with, because in your relation what can there have been, worth speaking of, to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flameâ âoh, the golden flame!â âa mere handful of black ashes?â Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon herâ âthe duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the Ă©migrĂ©, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery.
This imagined service to the woman who could no longer help herself was one of the traps set for Maggieâs spirit at every turn of the road; the click of which, catching and holding the divine faculty fast, was followed inevitably by a flutter, by a struggle of wings and even, as we may say, by a scattering of fine feathers. For they promptly enough felt, these yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy, the concussion that couldnât bring them downâ âthe arrest produced by the so remarkably distinct figure that, at Fawns, for the previous weeks, was constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end of any watched perspective. Whoever knew, or whoever didnât, whether or to what extent Charlotte, with natural business in Eaton Square, had shuffled other opportunities under that cloak, it was all matter for the kind of quiet ponderation the little man who so kept his wandering way had made his own. It was part of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his white waistcoat, of the trick of his hands in his pockets, of the detachment of the attention he fixed on
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