The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
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He considered, but he met it. âAh, but one does know. I do, at leastâ âand by instinct. I donât fail. That will always protect me.â
It was funny, the way he said such things; yet she liked him, really, the more for it. They fell in for her with a general, or rather with a special, vision. But she spoke with a mild despair.
âWhat then will protect me?â
âWhere Iâm concerned I will. From me at least youâve nothing to fear,â he now quite amiably responded. âAnything you consent to accept from meâ ââ But he paused.
âWell?â
âWell, shall be perfect.â
âThatâs very fine,â she presently answered. âItâs vain, after all, for you to talk of my accepting things when youâll accept nothing from me.â
Ah, there, better still, he could meet her. âYou attach an impossible condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to myself.â
Well, she looked, before him there, at the conditionâ âthen, abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a headshake of disenchantmentâ âso far as the idea had appealed to her. It all appeared too difficult. âOh, my âconditionââ âI donât hold to it. You may cry it on the housetopsâ âanything I ever do.â
âAh well, thenâ â!â This made, he laughed, all the difference.
But it was too late. âOh, I donât care now! I should have liked the Bowl. But if that wonât do thereâs nothing.â
He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again; but after a moment he qualified. âYet I shall want some day to give you something.â
She wondered at him. âWhat day?â
âThe day you marry. For you will marry. You mustâ âseriouslyâ âmarry.â
She took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been pressed. âTo make you feel better?â
âWell,â he replied frankly, wonderfullyâ ââit will. But here,â he added, âis your hansom.â
He had signalledâ âthe cab was charging. She put out no hand for their separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she did so, however, she said what had been gathering while she waited. âWell, I would marry, I think, to have something from you in all freedom.â
Part Second VIIAdam Verver, at Fawns, that autumn Sunday, might have been observed to open the door of the billiard-room with a certain freedomâ âmight have been observed, that is, had there been a spectator in the field. The justification of the push he had applied, however, and of the push, equally sharp, that, to shut himself in, he again appliedâ âthe ground of this energy was precisely that he might here, however briefly, find himself alone, alone with the handful of letters, newspapers and other unopened missives, to which, during and since breakfast, he had lacked opportunity to give an eye. The vast, square, clean apartment was empty, and its large clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly-condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered village and strong cloudshadow, which were, together, a thing to create the sense, with everyone else at church, of oneâs having the world to oneâs self. We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with Mr. Verver; the very fact of his striking, as he would have said, for solitude, the fact of his quiet flight, almost on tiptoe, through tortuous corridors, investing him with an interest that makes our attentionâ âtender indeed almost to compassionâ âqualify his achieved isolation. For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always figured other personsâ âsuch was the law of his natureâ âas a numerous array, and that, though conscious of but a single near tie, one affection, one duty deepest-rooted in his life, it had never, for many minutes together, been his portion not to feel himself surrounded and committed, never quite been his refreshment to make out where the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint, diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity, really faded to the blessed impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes ached. It shaded off, the appealâ âhe would have admitted that; but he had as yet noted no point at which it positively stopped.
Thus had grown in him a little habitâ âhis innermost secret, not confided even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood, to his view, everythingâ âthus had shaped itself the innocent trick of occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved in the preservation by an adult of one of childhoodâs toys. When he took a rare moment âoff,â he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of infancyâ âsticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock of a wooden gun. It was essentially, in him, the imitation of depravityâ âwhich, for amusement, as might have been, he practised âkeeping up.â In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so artlessly-artful interludes were condemned, by the nature of the case, to brevity. He had fatally stamped himselfâ âit was his own faultâ âa man who could be interrupted with impunity. The greatest of wonders, moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever have got,
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