Henry James

“ Abel Taker, till dinner-time, turned over his little adventure and extracted, while he hovered and smoked and mused, some refreshment from the impression the subtlety of communion had left with him. Mrs. Vanderplank was his senior by several years, and was neither fair nor slim nor "bright" nor truly, nor even falsely, elegant, nor anything that Sue had taught him, in her wonderful way, to associate with the American woman at the American woman's best—that best than which there was nothing better, as he had so often heard her say, on God's great earth. ”

“ There was an excitement, the excitement of personal risk, about it—much the same as would belong for an ordinary man to the first trial of a flying-machine; yet it was exactly such a course as Sue had prescribed on his asking her what he should do. "Anything in the world you like but talk about me: think of some other woman, as bad and bold as you please, and say you're married to her." ”

“ She testified unmistakably to the greater energy of women; for he could think of no manifestation of spirit on his own part that might pass for an equivalent, in the way of resistance, of protest, to the rhythmic though rather wiggy water-waves that broke upon her bald-looking brow as upon a beach bared by a low tide. He had cocked up often enough—and as with the intention of doing it still more under Sue's nose than under his own—the two ends of his half-"sandy" half-grizzled moustache, and he had in fact given these ornaments an extra twist just before coming in to luncheon. ”

“ It kept coming back to him, naturally, that he hadn't the breadth of fancy, that he knew himself as he knew the taste of ill-made coffee, that he was the same old Abel Taker he had ever been, in whose aggregation of items it was as vain to feel about for latent heroisms as it was useless to rummage one's trunk for presentable clothes that one didn't possess. But did that absolve him (having so definitely Sue's permission) from seeing to what extent he might temporarily make believe? ”

“ And she wasn't formed for duplicity, the large simple scared foolish fond woman, the vague anxiety in whose otherwise so uninhabited and unreclaimed countenance, as void of all history as an expanse of Western prairie seen from a car-window, testified to her scant aptitude for her part. He was far from the desire to question their hostess, however—for the study of his companion's face on its mere inferred merits had begun to dawn upon him as the possible resource of his ridiculous leisure. ”

“ It was true that he had had to do for a long time with no woman in the world but Sue, and of the practice of opposition so far as Sue was concerned the end had been determined early in his career. His hostess fortunately accepted his word, but the way in which her momentary attention bored into his secret like the turn of a gimlet gave him a sense of the quantity of life that passed before her as a dealer with all comers—gave him almost an awe of her power of not wincing. She knew he wasn't, he couldn't be, C. P. Addard, even though she mightn't know, or still less care, who he was ”

“ She knows I back her," Abel smiled, "and that's enough for her. 'You be quiet and I'll let you know when you're wanted'—that's her motto; I'm to wait, wherever I am, till I'm called for. But I guess she won't be in a hurry to call for me"—this reflexion he showed he was familiar with. "I've stood in her light so long—her 'social' light, outside of which everything is for Sue black darkness—that I don't really see the reason she should ever want me back. ”

“ It was Abel's idea, promptly enough expressed to Mrs. Magaw, that they ought to get something out of it; but when he had said that a few times over (the first time she had met it in silence) , she finally replied, and in a manner that he thought quite sublime: "Well, we shall—if they do all they want. We shall feel we've helped. And it isn't so very much to do."
"You think it isn't so very much to do—to lie down and die for them?" ”

“ Addard's grave." And after they had all come out to coffee in the rustling shade, with the vociferous German tribe at one end of the terrace, the English family keeping silence with an English accent, as it struck him, in the middle, and his direction taken, by his new friend's side, to the other unoccupied corner, he found himself oppressed with what he had on his hands, the burden of keeping up this expensive fiction. He had never been to Constantinople—it could easily be proved against him; he ought to have thought of something better, have got his effect on easier terms. ”

“ What the single situation lacked the pair of situations would supply—there was drama enough, with economy, from the moment sad companions, looking each other, with their identities of pluck and despair, a little hard in the face, should confess each to the other, relievingly, what they kept from every one else. ”

“ They parted accordingly, as if to relieve, till they could recover themselves, the conscious tension of their being able neither to hang back with grace nor to advance with glory; but flagrantly full, at the same time, both of the recognition that they couldn't in such a place avoid each other even if they had desired it, and of the suggestion that they wouldn't desire it, after such subtlety of communion, even were it to be thought of. ”

“ If he meant it, however, in any such sense as that Mattie might be able in due course to render an equivalent of aid, this notion clearly had to reckon with his companion's sense of its strangeness, exhibited in her now at last upheaved countenance. "Yes," he accordingly insisted, "it will work round to that—you see if it doesn't. If that's where they were to come out, and they have come—by which I mean if Sue has realised it for Mattie and acted as she acts when she does realise, then she can't neglect it in her own case: she'll just have to realise it for herself. ”

“ One had only to be reminded that for the effect of quick roundness the small smooth situation, though as intense as one will, is prudently indicated, and that for a fine complicated entangled air nothing will serve that doesn't naturally swell and bristle—one had only, I say, to be so warned off or warned on, to see forthwith no beauty for the simple thing that shouldn't, and even to perversity, enrich it, and none for the other, the comparatively intricate, that shouldn't press it out as a mosaic. ”

“ Her life and her pride, as well as her husband's with them, become subject, from the hour of the awful accident, to the redemption of their debt; which, effort by effort, sacrifice by sacrifice, franc by franc, with specious pretexts, excuses, a rage of desperate explanation of their failure to restore the missing object, they finally obliterate all to find that their whole consciousness and life have been convulsed and deformed in vain, that the pearls were but highly artful "imitation" and that their passionate penance has ruined them for nothing. ”

“ Magaw conceded. "But it isn't what I am—it's what I'm passing for. Or rather"—she worked it out—"what I'm just not. I'm not passing—I don't, can't here, where it doesn't matter, you see—for her mother."
Abel quite fell in. "Certainly she doesn't want to have any mother."
"She doesn't want to have me. She wants me to lay low. If I lay low, she says———"
"Oh I know what she says"—Abel took it straight up. "It's the very same as what Mrs. Taker says. If you lie low she can fly high." ”

“ It seemed harmless sport simply to turn that situation round—to shift, in other words, the ground of the horrid mistake, making this a matter not of a false treasure supposed to be true and precious, but of a real treasure supposed to be false and hollow: though a new little "drama," a new setting for my pearls—and as different as possible from the other—had of course withal to be found. ”

“ In "La Parure" a poor young woman, under "social" stress, the need of making an appearance on an important occasion, borrows from an old school friend, now much richer than herself, a pearl necklace which she has the appalling misfortune to lose by some mischance never afterwards cleared up. ”

“ The form of "The Middle Years" is not that of the nouvelle, but that of the concise anecdote; whereas the subject treated would perhaps seem one comparatively demanding "developments"—if indeed, amid these mysteries, distinctions were so absolute. (There is of course neither close nor fixed measure of the reach of a development, which in some connexions seems almost superfluous and then in others to represent the whole sense of the matter; and we should doubtless speak more thoroughly by book had we some secret for exactly tracing deflexions and returns.) ”

“ The death-chamber was Madame Massin's terrace; and—he completed the image—how could Sue not want to know how things were looking for the funeral, which was in any case to be thoroughly "quiet"? The vivid thing seemed to pass before Abel's eyes the day he heard of the bright compatriot, just the person to go round with, a charming handsome witty widow, whom Miss Magaw had met at Fordham Castle, whose ideas were, on all important points, just the same as her own, whose means also (so that they could join forces on an equality) matched beautifully, and whose name in fine was Mrs. ”

“ He really made out, with the idle human instinct, the crude sense for other people's pains and pleasures that had, on his showing, to his so great humiliation, been found an inadequate outfit for the successful conduct of the coal, the commission, the insurance and, as a last resort, desperate and disgraceful, the book-agency business—he really made out that she didn't want to know, or wouldn't for some little time ”

“ One had, for the vanity of a priori wisdom here, only to be so constituted that to see any form of beauty, for a particular application, proscribed or even questioned, was forthwith to covet that form more than any other and to desire the benefit of it exactly there. ”

“ This precisely, Abel Taker could infer, was the reason of a remark she had made him before the claims of the letter had been settled. "I shall put you next the American lady—the one who arrived yesterday. I know you'll be kind to her; she had to go to bed, as soon as she got here, with a sick-headache brought on by her journey. But she's better. Who isn't better as soon as they get here? She's coming down, and I'm sure she'd like to know you."
Taker had now the letter in his hand—the letter intended for "Mr. C. P. Addard" ”

“ After which fashion the careful craftsman would have prepared himself the special inviting treat of scarce being able to say, at his highest infatuation, before any series, which might be the light thing weighted and which the dense thing clarified. ”

“ Mrs. Magaw fixed him with a milder solemnity. "But what has Mrs. Taker against you?"
"It's sweet of you to ask," he smiled; while it really came to him that he was living with her under ever so much less strain than what he had been feeling for ever so long before from Sue. Wouldn't he have liked it to go on and on—wouldn't that have suited C. P. Addard? He seemed to be finding out who C. P. Addard was—so that it came back again to the way Sue fixed things. She had fixed them so that C. P. Addard could become quite interested in Mrs. Vanderplank and quite soothed by her and so that Mrs. ”

“ Vanderplank to so stating the case, he finally found himself believing in Miss Magaw with just as few reserves as those with which he believed in Sue. If it was a question of her "shining" she would indubitably shine; she was evidently, like the wife by whom he had been, in the early time, too provincially, too primitively accepted, of the great radiating substance, and there were times, here at Madame Massin's, while he strolled to and fro and smoked, when Mrs. ”

“ With the right encounter and the right surprise, that is with the right persons, postulated, the relief, if in the right degree exquisite, might be the drama—and the right persons, in fine, to make it exquisite, were Stuart Straith and Mrs. ”

“ It makes you feel you'd have done better———"
"To bring them right home and have it done over there?" he had asked as she let the sad subject go a little. He quite agreed. "Yes—that's what many do."
"But it gives of course a peculiar interest." So they had kept it up. "I mean in places that mightn't have so very much."
"Places like Rome and Constantinople?" ”

“ These ideas would have germed, infallibly, in the brain of the young woman, her only child, under whose rigid rule she now—it was to be detected—drew her breath in pain. Madame Massin would abysmally know, Abel reflected, for he was at the end of a few minutes more intimately satisfied that Mrs. Magaw's American newspapers, coming to her straight from the other side and not yet detached from their wrappers, would not be directed to Mrs. ”

“ Sherrington Reeve. "Mattie has felt the want," Mrs. Magaw explained, "of some lady, some real lady like that, to go round with: she says she sometimes doesn't find it very pleasant going round alone."
Abel Taker had listened with interest this in formation left him staring. "By Gosh, then, she has struck Sue!" ”