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
Yet he was far, he could still remind himself, from supposing that she had been grossly remunerated. He was wholly sure she hadnât; for if there were people who took presents and people who didnât she would be quite on the right side and of the proud class. Only then, on the other hand, her disinterestedness was rather awfulâ âit implied, that is, such abysses of confidence. She was admirably attached to Maggieâ âwhose possession of such a friend might moreover quite rank as one of her âassetsâ; but the great proof of her affection had been in bringing them, with her design, together. Meeting him during a winter in Rome, meeting him afterwards in Paris, and âlikingâ him, as she had in time frankly let him know from the first, she had marked him for her young friendâs own and had then, unmistakably, presented him in a light. But the interest in Maggieâ âthat was the pointâ âwould have achieved but little without her interest in him. On what did that sentiment, unsolicited and unrecompensed, rest? what good, againâ âfor it was much like his question about Mr. Ververâ âshould he ever have done her? The Princeâs notion of a recompense to womenâ âsimilar in this to his notion of an appealâ âwas more or less to make love to them. Now he hadnât, as he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs. Assinghamâ ânor did he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days, to mark them off, the women to whom he hadnât made love: it representedâ âand that was what pleased him in itâ âa different stage of existence from the time at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham herself been either aggressive or resentful. On what occasion, ever, had she appeared to find him wanting? These things, the motives of such people, were obscureâ âa little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune. He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wifeâs countrymanâ âwhich was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Poleâ âor was it the South?â âthan anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blacknessâ âbut as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks.
Shocks, however, from these quite different depths, were not what he saw reason to apprehend; what he rather seemed to himself not yet to have measured was something that, seeking a name for it, he would have called the quantity of confidence reposed in him. He had stood still, at many a moment of the previous month, with the thought, freshly determined or renewed, of the general expectationâ âto define it roughlyâ âof which he was the subject. What was singular was that it seemed not so much an expectation of anything in particular as a large, bland, blank assumption of merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and value. It was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used, stamped with glorious arms, medieval, wonderful, of which the âworthâ in mere modern change, sovereigns and half
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