Henry James

“ She didn't, in the first place, so much as know who he was—by which he meant know who and what it was to be a White-Mason, even a poor and a dear and old one, "anyway." That indeed—he did her perfect justice—was of the very essence of the newness and freshness and beautiful, brave social irresponsibility by which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his already almost legendary past ”

“ Which they truly were, he could have the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but spectrally faded, hadn't in every particular, frames and balloon skirts and false "property" balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all, the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual imminent ache of one's protective scowl, one would verily but have to let the scowl stiffen or to take up seriously the question of blue goggles, during what might remain of life. ”

“ I suppose you at least know it," Cornelia smiled.
Yes, it was like the other time and yet it wasn't. She was like—poor Cornelia was—everything that used to be; that somehow was most definite to him. Still he could quite reply, "Do you call it—her adoring me—my situation?"
"Well, it's a part of yours, surely—if you're in love with her."
"Am I, ridiculous old person! in love with her?" White-Mason asked.
"I may be a ridiculous old person," Cornelia returned—"and, for that matter, of course I am ! But she's young and lovely and rich and clever: so what could be more natural?" ”

“ Mrs Worthingham had practically, even if accidentally, helped him to knowledge; the last nail in the coffin of the poor dear extinct past had been planted for him by his having thus to reach his antique contemporary through perforation of the newest newness. The note of this particular recognition was in fact the more prescribed to him that the ground of Cornelia's return to a scene swept so bare of the associational charm was certainly inconspicuous. ”

“ He positively cherished in fact, as against the too inveterate gesture of distressfully guarding his eyeballs—so many New York aspects seemed to keep him at it—an ideal of adjusted appreciation, of courageous curiosity, of fairly letting the world about him, a world of constant breathless renewals and merciless substitutions, make its flaring assault on its own inordinate terms. ”

“ He could still enjoy almost anything, absolutely an unpleasant thing, in default of a better, that might still remind him he wasn't so old. The standing newness of everything about him would, it was true, have weakened this cheer by too much presuming on it; Mrs Worthingham's house, before which he stopped, had that gloss of new money, that glare of a piece fresh from the mint and ringing for the first time on any counter, which seems to claim for it, in any transaction, something more than the "face" value. ”

“ The few scattered surviving representatives of a society once "good"—rari nantes in gurgite vasto—were liable, at the pass things had come to, to meet, and even amid old shades once sacred, or what was left of such, every form of social impossibility, and, more irresistibly still, to find these apparitions often carry themselves (often at least in the case of the women) with a wondrous wild gallantry, equally imperturbable and inimitable, the sort of thing that reached its maximum in Mrs Worthingham. ”

“ However that might be, his curiosity was occupied rather with the conceivable hinge of poor Cornelia's: it was perhaps thinkable that even Mrs Worthingham's New York, once it should have become possible again at all, might have put forth to this lone exile a plea that wouldn't be in the chords of Bognor. For himself, after all, too, the attraction had been much more of the Europe over which one might move at one's ease, and which therefore could but cost, and cost much, right and left, than of the Europe adapted to scrimping. ”

“ The second ground of this immediate impression of scenic extravagance, almost as if the curtain rose for him to the first act of some small and expensively mounted comic opera, was that she hadn't, after all, awaited him in fond singleness, but had again just a trifle inconsiderately exposed him to the drawback of having to reckon, for whatever design he might amiably entertain, with the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger. ”

“ But one's own poor relics and odds and ends are one's own at least; and one has—yes—come back to them. They're all I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was paying—!" Miss Rasch woefully added.
He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against him, was good to his palm. "Mrs Worthingham's things? You think them beautiful?"
Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. ”

“ He had paused once more with his point but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. "Surely if you know for yourself—!"
"Ah, it doesn't seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman," he argued—but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl—"to know for one, to know with one. ”

“ In his time, when he was young or even when he was only but a little less middle-aged, the best manners had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some art of not insisting on one's luxurious differences, of concealing rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be "in the know."
Oh, the "know"—Mrs Worthingham was in it, all instinctively, inevitably and as a matter of course, up to her eyes ”

“ Isn't that conceded?"
"No doubt every horror, at the pass we've come to, is conceded. That's just what I complain of."
"Do you complain?" she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn't have imagined such a thing.
"To me her things are awful. They're the newest of the new."
"Ah, but the old forms!"
"Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions."
"Oh, but," she pleaded, "we can't all be really old."
"No, we can't, Cornelia. But you can—!" said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation. ”

“ There were vital facts he seemed thus to catch, to seize, with a nervous hand, and the twilight helping, by their vaguely-whisked tails; unquiet truths that swarmed out after the fashion of creatures bold only at eventide, creatures that hovered and circled, that verily brushed his nose, in spite of their shyness. ”

“ The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back. "Ah, the ideas of people now—!"
"Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us." But he ruefully faced it. "We've none the less, however, to live with them."
"With their ideas—?" Cornelia questioned.
"With them—these modern wonders; such as they are!" Then he went on: "It must have been to help me you've come back."
She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. "What has become of yours? I mean of her." ”

“ Cornelia said.
He showed their small relic again with assurance. "You wanted us. Then here we are. Oh, how we can talk!—with all those things you know! You are an invention. And you'll see there are things I know. I shall turn up here—well, daily."
She took it in, but after a moment only answered. "There was something you said just now you'd tell me. Don't you mean to try—?"
"Mrs Worthingham?" He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew's carte-de-visite, folding it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he spoke. ”

“ The idea of taking the field in any manner on the subject of Mrs Worthingham's resources would have affected him on the other hand as an odious ordeal, some glare of embarrassment and exposure in a circle of hard unhelpful attention, of converging, derisive, unsuggestive eyes. ”

“ Once he had got into motion, once he had crossed the Park and passed out of it, entering, with very little space to traverse, one of the short new streets that abutted on its east side, his step became that of a man young enough to find confidence, quite to find felicity, in the sense, in almost any sense, of action. ”

“ One wouldn't do that for the world—a rudimentary discretion forbade it; and yet this check from elementary undiscussable taste quite consorted with a due respect for them, or at any rate with a due respect for oneself in connection with them; as was just exemplified in what would be his own, what would be poor dear old White-Mason's, insurmountable aversion to having, on any pretext, the doubtless very queer spectre of the late Mr Worthingham presented to him. ”

“ He had little to learn about the attraction of Europe, and rather expected that in the event of his union with Mrs Worthingham he should find himself pleading for it with the competence of one more in the "know" about Paris and Rome, about Venice and Florence, than even she could be. He could have lived on in his New York, that is in the sentimental, the spiritual, the more or less romantic visitation of it ”

“ Thick-strown with such gleanings the occasion seemed indeed, in spite of the truth that they perhaps wouldn't have proved, under cross-examination, to have rubbed shoulders in the other life so very hard. ”

“ Newness was value in the piece—for the acquisitor, or at least sometimes might be, even though the act of "blowing" hard, the act marking a heated freshness of arrival, or other form of irruption, could never minister to the peace of those already and long on the field ”