The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) š
- Author: Henry James
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Well, he produced one on the spot. āThe moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. Iāve of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But itās no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircaseā āhalf-ruined into the bargain!ā āin some castle of our quattrocento is like the ālightning elevatorā in one of Mr. Ververās fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steamā āit sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing thatā āwell, that itās as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again.ā
āTrusting,ā Mrs. Assingham smiled, āto get up some other way?ā
āYesā āor not to have to get up at all. However,ā he added, āI told you that at the beginning.ā
āMachiavelli!ā she simply exclaimed.
āYou do me too much honour. I wish indeed I had his genius. However, if you really believe I have his perversity you wouldnāt say it. But itās all right,ā he gaily enough concluded; āI shall always have you to come to.ā
On this, for a little, they sat face to face; after which, without comment, she asked him if he would have more tea. All she would give him, he promptly signified; and he developed, making her laugh, his idea that the tea of the English race was somehow their morality, āmade,ā with boiling water, in a little pot, so that the more of it one drank the more moral one would become. His drollery served as a transition, and she put to him several questions about his sister and the others, questions as to what Bob, in particular, Colonel Assingham, her husband, could do for the arriving gentlemen, whom, by the Princeās leave, he would immediately go to see. He was funny, while they talked, about his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their habits, imitations of their manners and prophecies of their conduct, as more rococo than anything Cadogan Place would ever have known. This, Mrs. Assingham professed, was exactly what would endear them to her, and that, in turn, drew from her visitor a fresh declaration of all the comfort of his being able so to depend on her. He had been with her, at this point, some twenty minutes; but he had paid her much longer visits, and he stayed now as if to make his attitude prove his appreciation. He stayed moreoverā āthat was really the sign of the hourā āin spite of the nervous unrest that had brought him and that had in truth much rather fed on the scepticism by which she had apparently meant to soothe it. She had not soothed him, and there arrived, remarkably, a moment when the cause of her failure gleamed out. He had not frightened her, as she called itā āhe felt that; yet she was herself not at ease. She had been nervous, though trying to disguise it; the sight of him, following on the announcement of his name, had shown her as disconcerted. This conviction, for the young man, deepened and sharpened; yet with the effect, too, of making him glad in spite of it. It was as if, in calling, he had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow importantā āthat was what it wasā āthat there should be at this hour something the matter with Mrs. Assingham, with whom, in all their acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the least little thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was to know, of a truth, that there was something the matter with him; since strangely, with so little to go uponā āhis heart had positively begun to beat to the tune of suspense. It fairly befell at last, for a climax, that they almost ceased to pretendā āto pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisisā āneither could have said how long it lastedā āduring which they were reduced, for all interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous stillness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even enacting a tableau-vivant.
The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communionā āor indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs. Assinghamās dark, neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she desired. Full of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs. Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actressā āthese things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the south, or still more of the east, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact, however, neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been, recordedly, her birthplace and āEuropeā punctually her discipline. She wore yellow and purple because she thought it better, as she said, while one was about it, to look like the Queen of Sheba than like a revendeuse; she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in her
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