The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) š
- Author: Henry James
Book online Ā«The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) šĀ». Author Henry James
She couldnāt have been sure beforehand, and had really not been; but the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion. Nothing in the world, of a truth, had ever been so sweet to her, as his look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it. She troubled himā āwhich hadnāt been at all her purpose; she mystified himā āwhich she couldnāt help and, comparatively, didnāt mind; then it came over her that he had, after all, a simplicity, very considerable, on which she had never dared to presume. It was a discoveryā ānot like the other discovery she had once made, but giving out a freshness; and she recognised again in the light of it the number of the ideas of which he thought her capable. They were all, apparently, queer for him, but she had at least, with the lapse of the months, created the perception that there might be something in them; whereby he stared there, beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with. There was something of his own in his mind, to which, she was sure, he referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go of it, from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room, after his encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging it at him, on the question of her fatherās view of him, her determined āFind out for yourself!ā She had been aware, during the months, that he had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any other source. Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their companions. Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause, that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation. What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer to him, her fatherās and her own, of an opportunity to separate from Mrs. Verver with the due amount of formā āand all the more that he was, in so pathetic a way, unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on the score of taste. Taste, in him, as a touchstone, was now all at sea; for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine of them, wouldnāt be, exactly, that taste by itself, the taste he had always conformed to, had no importance whatever? If meanwhile, at all events, he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again. She was invoking that reflection at the very moment he brought out, in reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity. āTheyāre doing the wisest thing, you know. For if they were ever to goā ā!ā And he looked down at her over his cigar.
If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her fatherās age, Charlotteās need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to ālive intoā their queer futureā āit was high time that they should take up their courage. This was eminent sense, but it didnāt arrest the Princess, who, the next moment, had found a form for her challenge. āBut shanāt you then so much as miss her a little? Sheās wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically,ā Maggie went onā āāsheās so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done with life. But dying for usā āfor you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left.ā
The Prince smoked hard a minute. āAs you say, sheās splendid, but there isā āthere always will beā āmuch of her left. Only, as you also say, for others.ā
āAnd yet I think,ā the Princess returned, āthat it isnāt as if we had wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? Itās as if her unhappiness had been necessary to usā āas if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us.ā
He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid inquiry. āWhy do you speak of the unhappiness of your fatherās wife?ā
They exchanged a long lookā āthe time that it took her to find her reply. āBecause not toā ā!ā
āWell,
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