The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
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âThe last?â
âI take it as their goodbye.â And she smiled as she could always smile. âThey come in stateâ âto take formal leave. They do everything thatâs proper. Tomorrow,â she said, âthey go to Southampton.â
âIf they do everything thatâs proper,â the Prince presently asked, âwhy donât they at least come to dine?â
She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer. âThat we must certainly ask them. It will be easy for you. But of course theyâre immensely takenâ â!â
He wondered. âSo immensely taken that they canâtâ âthat your father canâtâ âgive you his last evening in England?â
This, for Maggie, was more difficult to meet; yet she was still not without her stopgap. âThat may be what theyâll proposeâ âthat we shall go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebrationâ âexcept that, to round it thoroughly off, we ought also to have Fanny and the Colonel. They donât want them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them, beforehand. They want only us together; and if they cut us down to tea,â she continued, âas they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps itâs for the fancy, after all, of their keeping their last night in London for each other.â
She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them back, even though, as she heard herself, she might have been throwing everything to the winds. But wasnât that the right wayâ âfor sharing his last day of captivity with the man one adored? It was every moment more and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prisonâ âwaiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast, or a high discourse, of their last poor resources. If she had broken with everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply then take it soâ âtake it that what she had worked for was too near, at last, to let her keep her head. She might have been losing her head verily in her husbandâs eyesâ âsince he didnât know, all the while, that the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her disposition personally to seize him. He didnât know, either, that this was her mannerâ ânow she was with himâ âof beguiling audaciously the supremacy of suspense. For the people of the French Revolution, assuredly, there wasnât suspense; the scaffold, for those she was thinking of, was certainâ âwhereas what Charlotteâs telegram announced was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation. Just the point, however, was in its being clearer to herself than to him; her clearnesses, clearancesâ âthose she had so all but abjectly laboured forâ âthreatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron bars, that regale, on occasion, precisely, the fevered vision of those who are in chains. She was going to know, she felt, later onâ âwas going to know with compunction, doubtless, on the very morrow, how thumpingly her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together: she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted. She should judge at leisure even that avidity for an issue which was making so little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened. He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law and Mrs. Verver, by her glance at their possible preference for a concentrated evening. âBut it isnâtâ âis it?â he askedâ ââas if they were leaving each other?â
âOh no; it isnât as if they were leaving each other. Theyâre only bringing to a closeâ âwithout knowing when it may open againâ âa time that has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them.â Yes, she could talk so of their âtimeââ âshe was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground. âThey have their reasonsâ âmany things to think of; how can one tell? But thereâs always, also, the chance of his proposing to me that we shall have our last hours together; I mean that he and I shall. He may wish to take me off to dine with him somewhere aloneâ âand to do it in memory of old days. I mean,â the Princess went on, âthe real old days; before my grand husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was: the wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done, his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains. The way weâve sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, weâve stayed on and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for, the things he had
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