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
Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his walk. It would have been ridiculousâ âsuch a moral from such a sourceâ âif it hadnât all somehow fitted to the gravity of the hour, that gravity the oppression of which I began by recording. Another feature was the immediate nearness of the arrival of the contingent from home. He was to meet them at Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel; his sister and her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the most disponible of ex-deputies and of relativesâ âa scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of Maggieâs plea for hymeneal reserve, were to accompany him to the altar. It was no great array, yet it was apparently to be a more numerous muster than any possible to the bride herself, having no wealth of kinship to choose from and making it up, on the other hand, by loose invitations. He had been interested in the girlâs attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it, giving him, as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the kind of ruminations she would in general be governed byâ âwhich were quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadnât natural relations, she and her father, she had explained; so they wouldnât try to supply the place by artificial, by make-believe ones, by any searching of highways and hedges. Oh yes, they had acquaintances enoughâ âbut a marriage was an intimate thing. You asked acquaintances when you had your kith and kinâ âyou asked them over and above. But you didnât ask them alone, to cover your nudity and look like what they werenât. She knew what she meant and what she liked, and he was all ready to take from her, finding a good omen in both of the facts. He expected her, desired her, to have character; his wife should have it, and he wasnât afraid of her having much. He had had, in his earlier time, to deal with plenty of people who had had it; notably with the three four ecclesiastics, his great-uncle, the Cardinal, above all, who had taken a hand and played a part in his education: the effect of all of which had never been to upset him. He was thus fairly on the lookout for the characteristic in this most intimate, as she was to come, of his associates. He encouraged it when it appeared.
He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in order, as if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in his life before and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It would open again, doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the Romans; it would even perhaps open with his dining tonight in Portland Place, where Mr. Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius. But what meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have said, was his sense of the immediate two or three hours. He paused on corners, at crossings; there kept rising for him, in waves, that consciousness, sharp as to its source while vague as to its end, which I began by speaking ofâ âthe consciousness of an appeal to
Comments (0)