44 Works of Henry James
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I George Dane had opened his eyes to a bright new day, the face of nature well washed by last night’s downpour and shining as with high spirits, good resolutions, lively intentions–the great glare of recommencement in short fixed in his patch of sky. He had sat up late to finish work–arrears overwhelming, then at […]
Part I When the porter’s wife, who used to answer the house-bell, announced “A gentleman and a lady, sir” I had, as I often had in those days–the wish being father to the thought–an immediate vision of sitters. Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in the sense I should have […]
I The weather had turned so much worse that the rest of the day was certainly lost. The wind had risen and the storm gathered force; they gave from time to time a thump at the firm windows and dashed even against those protected by the veranda their vicious splotches of rain. Beyond the lawn, […]
THE LITTLE PICTURE gallery at M——is a typicalmusee de province——cold, musty, unvisited, and enriched chiefly with miniature works by painters whose maturity was not to be powerful. The floors are tiled in brick, and the windows draped in faded moreen; the very light seems pale and neutral, as if the dismal lack-lustre atmosphere of the […]
I What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention–spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which […]
I At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels, for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travelers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake–a lake that it behooves every tourist to visit. […]
CHAPTER I Frank Granger had arrived from Paris to paint a portrait–an order given him, as a young compatriot with a future, whose early work would some day have a price, by a lady from New York, a friend of his own people and also, as it happened, of Addie’s, the young woman to whom […]
We are scattered now, the friends of the late Mr. Oliver Offord; but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a certain esoteric respect for each other. “Yes, you too have been in Arcadia,” we seem not too grumpily to allow. When I pass the house in Mansfield Street I remember […]
CHAPTER I “Well, we ARE a pair!” the poor lady’s visitor broke out to her at the end of her explanation in a manner disconcerting enough. The poor lady was Miss Cutter, who lived in South Audley Street, where she had an “upper half” so concise that it had to pass boldly for convenient; and […]
We had been talking about the masters who had achieved but a single masterpiece–the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known the divine afflatus and touched the high level of perfection. Our host had been showing us a charming little cabinet picture by a painter whose name we had never heard, […]
CHAPTER I FROM MISS MIRANDA MOPE, IN PARIS, TO MRS. ABRAHAM C. MOPE, AT BANGOR, MAINE. September 5th, 1879. My dear mother–I have kept you posted as far as Tuesday week last, and, although my letter will not have reached you yet, I will begin another before my news accumulates too much. I am glad […]
I HE had been out but once since his arrival, Mark Monteith; that was the next day after–he had disembarked by night on the previous; then everything had come at once, as he would have said, everything had changed. He had got in on Tuesday; he had spent Wednesday for the most part down town, […]
I HE thought he had already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fulness the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude, quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new literary star that had begun to […]
I THREE times within a quarter of an hour–shifting the while his posture on his chair of contemplation–had he looked at his watch as for its final sharp hint that he should decide, that he should get up. His seat was one of a group fairly sequestered, unoccupied save for his own presence, and from […]
1885 I am glad I said to you the other night at Doubleton, inquiring–too inquiring–compatriot, that I wouldn’t undertake to tell you the story (about Ambrose Tester), but would write it out for you; inasmuch as, thinking it over since I came back to town, I see that it may really be made interesting. It […]
I Never say you know the last words about any human heart! I was once treated to a revelation which startled and touched me in the nature of a person with whom I had been acquainted–well, as I supposed–for years, whose character I had had good reasons, heaven knows, to appreciate and in regard to […]
CHAPTER I “Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can–begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly […]
1885 I saw her only four times, but I remember them vividly; she made an impression upon me. I thought her very pretty and very interesting,–a charming specimen of a type. I am very sorry to hear of her death; and yet, when I think of it, why should I be sorry? The last time […]
Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: “Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening? Let her off easy, but not too easy.” I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: “Will […]
I had done a few things and earned a few pence–I had perhaps even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a fidgety habit, for it’s none of the longest yet) I count my real start from […]
Florence, April 5th, 1874.–They told me I should find Italy greatly changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room for changes. But to me everything is so perfectly the same that I seem to be living my youth over again; all the forgotten impressions of that enchanting time come back to me. At the moment […]
CHAPTER I. I had simply, I suppose, a change of heart, and it must have begun when I received my manuscript back from Mr. Pinhorn. Mr. Pinhorn was my “chief,” as he was called in the office: he had the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, which had been […]
CHAPTER I. An old lady, in a high drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the fire, where she sat knitting and warming her knees. She was dressed in deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however, by the somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in obedience to something that was […]
CHAPTER I “Won’t you stay a little longer?” the hostess asked while she held the girl’s hand and smiled. “It’s too early for every one to go– it’s too absurd.” Mrs. Churchley inclined her head to one side and looked gracious; she flourished about her face, in a vaguely protecting sheltering way, an enormous fan […]
CHAPTER I. “I wondered whether you wouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave. She looked down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm. Her charm was […]
“And I–what I seem to my friend, you see– What I soon shall seem to his love, you guess. What I seem to myself, do you ask of me? No hero, I confess.” A Light Woman.–Browning’s Men and Women. April 4, 1857.–I have changed my sky without changing my mind. I resume these old notes […]
I It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow. This was a subject on which it was, to the best of […]
I ‘Why, Cousin Raymond, how can you suppose? Why, she’s only sixteen!’ ‘She told me she was seventeen,’ said the young man, as if it made a great difference. ‘Well, only just!’ Mrs. Temperly replied, in the tone of graceful, reasonable concession. ‘Well, that’s a very good age for me. I’m very young.’ ‘You are […]
I She had walked with her friend to the top of the wide steps of the Museum, those that descended from the galleries of painting, and then, after the young man had left her, smiling, looking back, waving all gayly and expressively his hat and stick, had watched him, smiling too, but with a different […]
I The train was half an hour late and the drive from the station longer than he had supposed, so that when he reached the house its inmates had dispersed to dress for dinner and he was conducted straight to his room. The curtains were drawn in this asylum, the candles were lighted, the fire […]
I The houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert. The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot […]
“There are several objections to it, but I’ll take it if you’ll alter it,” Mr. Locket’s rather curt note had said; and there was no waste of words in the postscript in which he had added: “If you’ll come in and see me, I’ll show you what I mean.” This communication had reached Jersey Villas […]
CHAPTER I The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy. Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some more […]
CHAPTER I It has long been the custom of the North German Lloyd steamers, which convey passengers from Bremen to New York, to anchor for several hours in the pleasant port of Southampton, where their human cargo receives many additions. An intelligent young German, Count Otto Vogelstein, hardly knew a few years ago whether to […]
CHAPTER I “They’ve got him for life!” I said to myself that evening on my way back to the station; but later on, alone in the compartment (from Wimbledon to Waterloo, before the glory of the District Railway) I amended this declaration in the light of the sense that my friends would probably after all […]
CHAPTER I. It was at Homburg, several years ago, before the gaming had been suppressed. The evening was very warm, and all the world was gathered on the terrace of the Kursaal and the esplanade below it to listen to the excellent orchestra; or half the world, rather, for the crowd was equally dense in […]
PART I. I. She was certainly a singular girl, and if he felt at the end that he did n’t know her nor understand her, it is not surprising that he should have felt it at the beginning. But he felt at the beginning what he did not feel at the end, that her singularity […]
CHAPTER I Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the thread and let it lead me back to the first impression. The little story is all there, I can touch it from point to point; for the thread, as I call it, is a row of coloured beads […]
CHAPTER I. I was not rich–on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding- house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary career, and a friend of mine had said to me, “If […]
I. FROM MISS AURORA CHURCH, AT SEA, TO MISS WHITESIDE, IN PARIS. . . . My dear child, the bromide of sodium (if that’s what you call it) proved perfectly useless. I don’t mean that it did me no good, but that I never had occasion to take the bottle out of my bag. It […]
I find, as you prophesied, much that’s interesting, but little that helps the delicate question–the possibility of publication. Her diaries are less systematic than I hoped; she only had a blessed habit of noting and narrating. She summarised, she saved; she appears seldom indeed to have let a good story pass without catching it on […]
Mrs. Highmore’s errand this morning was odd enough to deserve commemoration: she came to ask me to write a notice of her great forthcoming work. Her great works have come forth so frequently without my assistance that I was sufficiently entitled on this occasion to open my eyes; but what really made me stare was […]
CHAPTER I Much as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction three weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about meeting him–conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not exempt from the suspicion that he had the […]
CHAPTER I Much as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction three weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about meeting him–conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not exempt from the suspicion that he had the […]