The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
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âThen do you yourself know?â
âHow muchâ â?â
âHow much.â
âHow farâ â?â
âHow far.â
Fanny had appeared to wish to make sure, but there was something she rememberedâ âremembered in time and even with a smile. âIâve told you before that I know absolutely nothing.â
âWellâ âthatâs what I know,â said the Princess.
Her friend again hesitated. âThen nobody knowsâ â? I mean,â Mrs. Assingham explained, âhow much your father does.â
Oh, Maggie showed that she understood. âNobody.â
âNotâ âa littleâ âCharlotte?â
âA little?â the Princess echoed. âTo know anything would be, for her, to know enough.â
âAnd she doesnât know anything?â
âIf she did,â Maggie answered, âAmerigo would.â
âAnd thatâs just itâ âthat he doesnât?â
âThatâs just it,â said the Princess profoundly.
On which Mrs. Assingham reflected. âThen how is Charlotte so held?â
âJust by that.â
âBy her ignorance?â
âBy her ignorance.â Fanny wondered. âA tormentâ â?â
âA torment,â said Maggie with tears in her eyes.
Her companion a moment watched them. âBut the Prince thenâ â?â
âHow is he held?â Maggie asked.
âHow is he held?â
âOh, I canât tell you that!â And the Princess again broke off.
XLIA telegram, in Charlotteâs name, arrived earlyâ ââWe shall come and ask you for tea at five, if convenient to you. Am wiring for the Assinghams to lunch.â This document, into which meanings were to be read, Maggie promptly placed before her husband, adding the remark that her father and his wife, who would have come up the previous night or that morning, had evidently gone to an hotel. The Prince was in his âownâ room, where he often sat now alone; half-a-dozen open newspapers, the âFigaroâ notably, as well as the âTimes,â were scattered about him; but, with a cigar in his teeth and a visible cloud on his brow, he appeared actually to be engaged in walking to and fro. Never yet, on thus approaching himâ âfor she had done it of late, under one necessity or another, several timesâ âhad a particular impression so greeted her; supremely strong, for some reason, as he turned quickly round on her entrance. The reason was partly the look in his faceâ âa suffusion like the flush of fever, which brought back to her Fanny Assinghamâs charge, recently uttered under that roof, of her âthinkingâ too impenetrably. The word had remained with her and made her think still more; so that, at first, as she stood there, she felt responsible for provoking on his part an irritation of suspense at which she had not aimed. She had been going about him these three months, she perfectly knew, with a maintained ideaâ âof which she had never spoken to him; but what had at last happened was that his way of looking at her, on occasion, seemed a perception of the presence not of one idea, but of fifty, variously prepared for uses with which he somehow must reckon. She knew herself suddenly, almost strangely, glad to be coming to him, at this hour, with nothing more abstract than a telegram; but even after she had stepped into his prison under her pretext, while her eyes took in his face and then embraced the four walls that enclosed his restlessness, she recognised the virtual identity of his condition with that aspect of Charlotteâs situation for which, early in the summer and in all the amplitude of a great residence, she had found, with so little seeking, the similitude of the locked cage. He struck her as caged, the man who couldnât now without an instant effect on her sensibility give an instinctive push to the door she had not completely closed behind her. He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food. There was a difference none the less, between his captivity and Charlotteâsâ âthe difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in his starting, on her entrance, as if even this were in its degree an interference. That was what betrayed for her, practically, his fear of her fifty ideas, and what had begun, after a minute, to make her wish to repudiate or explain. It was more wonderful than she could have told; it was for all the world as if she was succeeding with him beyond her intention. She had, for these instants, the sense that he exaggerated, that the imputation of purpose had fairly risen too high in him. She had begun, a year ago, by asking herself how she could make him think more of her; but what was it, after all, he was thinking now? He kept his eyes on her telegram; he read it more than once, easy as it was, in spite of its conveyed deprecation, to understand; during which she found herself almost awestruck with yearning, almost on the point of marking somehow what she had marked in the garden at Fawns with Charlotteâ âthat she had truly come unarmed. She didnât bristle with intentionsâ âshe scarce knew, as he at this juncture affected her, what had become of the only intention she had come with. She had nothing but her old idea, the old one he knew; she hadnât the ghost of another. Presently in fact, when four or five minutes had elapsed, it was as if she positively, hadnât so much even as that one. He gave her back her paper, asking with it if there were anything in particular she wished him to do.
She stood there with her eyes on him, doubling the telegram together as if it had been a precious thing and yet all the while holding her breath. Of a sudden, somehow, and quite as by the action of their merely having between them these few written words, an extraordinary fact came up. He was with her as if he were hers, hers in a degree and on a scale, with
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