Henry James

“ She faced him again like a waning wintry moon. "Attached to Mora? Why, she's my sister's child!"
"Ah; that, my dear, is no answer! Can you assure me on your honour that you're conscious of anything you can call real affection for her?"
Jane blankly brooded. "What has that to do with it?"
"I think it has everything. If we don't feel a tenderness."
"You certainly strike me as feeling one!" Mrs Traffle sarcastically cried.
He weighed it, but to the effect of his protesting. "No; not enough for me to demand of her to marry to spare my sensibility." ”

“ Mrs Traffle cried. "You'd do anything in the world for her, and she'd by the same token, I suppose, do anything in the world for you, and yet you ask me to believe that, all the while, you are, together, in this extraordinary way, doing nothing in the world—?" With which, to his further excruciation, her husband, with eyes averted from her, felt her face turn, as for a strained and unnatural intensity of meaning, upon himself. "He attempts, dear, to prove too much! ”

“ Mora's aunt tossed off.
Mr Puddick looked at her blandly. "Then you lose a good deal, ma'am. For if you wish to learn from me how much I admire your niece," he continued straight, "I don't in the least mind answering to that that you may put my sentiments at the highest. I adore Miss Montravers," he brought out, after a slight catch of his breath, roundly and impatiently. "I'd do anything in the world for her."
"Then do you pretend," said Jane, with a rush, as if to break through this opening before she was checked, "then do you pretend that you're living with her in innocence?" ”

“ Walter Puddick had a wait. "I never asked it of her."
"You didn't seduce her; no,—and even her aunt doesn't accuse you of it. But that she should have given up—well, what she has given up, moderately as you may estimate it," Traffle again smiled—"surely has something to say about her case?"
"What has more to say than anything else," Puddick promptly returned to this, "is that she's the very cleverest, and most original, and most endowed, and in every way most wonderful, person I've known in all my life." ”

“ It was a fool's question, and there was always a gape for the wisest (the greater the wisdom and the greater the folly) in any apprehension of such. As if he were going to say, remarkable Puddick, not less remarkable in his way than Mora,—to say, that is, anything that would suit Jane; and as if it didn't give her away for a goose that she should assume he was! Traffle had never more tiptoed off to the far end of the room, whether for pretence of a sudden interest in his precious little old Copley Fielding or on any other extemporized ground, than while their guest momentarily hung fire ”

“ She would have liked him, he easily recognized, to burst with curiosity, or, better still, to grovel with it, before she should so much as throw him a sop; but just this artless pride in her it was that, by the very candour of its extravagance, presently helped him to a keen induction. He had only to ask himself what could have occurred that would most of all things conduce to puffing her up with triumph, and then to reflect that, thoroughly to fill that bill, as who should say, she must have had a contrite call from Mora. ”

“ Not that he wanted to be too cold-blooded about her,—that is in the way of enlightened appreciation, the detachment of the simply scandalised state being another matter; for this was somehow to leave poor Jane, and poor Jane's gloom of misery, in the lurch. But once safely back from the studio, Puddick's own,—where he hadn't been sure, upon his honour, that some coarse danger mightn't crop up,—he indulged in a surreptitious vow that if any "fun," whether just freely or else more or less acutely speaking, was to come of the matter, he'd be blamed if he'd be wholly deprived of it! ”

“ I, for one, confess I miss the fun—put it only at the fun of our having had to wriggle so with shame, or, call it if you like, to live so under arms, against prying questions and the too easy exposure of our false explanations; which only proves, however, that, as I say, the worst that has happened to us appears to be that we're going to find life tame again—as tame as it was before ever Mora came into it so immensely to enrich and agitate it. ”

“ She had a fine little wait. "In her conduct. In his knowledge of it."
Again he had to rise to it. "With other persons?"
"With other persons. Even then."
Traffle thought. "But even when?"
"Even from the first," Jane grandly produced.
"Oh, oh, oh!" he found himself crying with a flush. He had had occasion to colour in the past for her flatness, but never for such an audacity of point. Wonderful, all round, in the light of reflection, seemed what Mora was doing for them. "It won't be her husband, at all events, who has put you up to that!" ”

“ He turned away with it, but Jane had already gone on. "Well, you certainly seem in sufficient possession of the right way to make us!"
Walter Puddick, picking up his hat, and with his distinctly artistic and animated young back presented,—though how it came to show so strikingly for such Sidney Traffle couldn't have said,—reached one of the doors of the room which was not right for his egress; while Sidney stood divided between the motion of correcting and guiding him and the irresistible need of covering Jane with a last woeful reproach. ”

“ Traffle liked, as the effect of this, to see his visitor look at him harder; he felt how the ideal turn of their relation would be that he should show all the tact he was so incontestably showing, and yet at the same time not miss anything that would be interesting. "You see of course for yourself how little, after all, she knows Mora. She doesn't appreciate the light hand that you must have to have with her—and that, I take it," Sidney Traffle smiled, "is what you contend for with us."
"I don't contend for anything with you, sir," said Walter Puddick. ”

“ To have dragged a busy person, a serious person, out from town on the implication of his being treated for reward to so bête an appeal,—no; one surely couldn't appear to have been concerned in that! Puddick had been under no obligation to come,—one might honestly have doubted whether he would even reply. However, his power of reply proved not inconsiderable, as consorted with his having presented himself not a bit ruefully or sulkily, but all easily and coolly, and even to a visible degree in a spirit of unprejudiced curiosity. ”

“ Mora was, accurately speaking, no sharer of his blood, and he absolutely denied her the right not alone socially to dishonour, but, beyond a mere ruffle of the surface, morally to discompose, him; mixed with which rather awkwardly, not to say perhaps a bit perversely, was the sense that as the girl was showing up, unmistakably, for one of the most curious of "cases,"—the term Puddick himself had used about her she wouldn't be unlikely to reward some independent, some intelligent notice. ”

“ It might have floored his hostess a little, to her husband's vision, but she seemed at once to sit up, on the contrary, so much straighter, that he, after hearing her, immediately turned round. "Don't you want, Mr Puddick, to be able to marry a creature so beautiful and so clever?"
This was somehow, suddenly, on Jane's part, so prodigious, for art and subtlety, Traffle recognised, that he had come forward again and a remarkable thing had followed. ”

“ Mrs Traffle's posture was now, more and more, certainly, this recumbent sightless stillness; which she appeared to have resorted to at first—after the launching, that is, of her ultimatum to Mr Puddick—as a sign of the intensity with which she awaited results. There had been no results, alas, there were none from week to week; never was the strain of suspense less gratefully crowned ”

“ People must have both if possible, but if they can only have one, I'm not sure that that one, as we've had it,—not at all 'feebly,' as you say!—is the better of the two. What do we know about the sense of life,—when it breaks out with real freedom? It has never broken out here, my dear, for long enough to leave its breath on the window-pane. But they've got it strong down there, in Puddick's studio. ”

“ Sidney Traffle had a groan for it,—a hunched groan, in which he exhaled the anguish, as he would have called it, of his false position; but Walter Puddick only continued, in his fine unblinking way, to meet Jane's eyes. "I repudiate absolutely your charge of my 'living' with her, or of her living with me. Miss Montravers is irreproachable, and immaculate." ”

“ Nominally—at first—he had come out to see you; but he asked for me on finding you absent, and when I had come in to him seemed to want nothing better—"
"Nothing better than to stay and stay, Jane?" he smiled as he took her up. "Why in the world should he? What I ask myself," Traffle went on, "is simply how in the world you yourself could bear it." ”

“ The terrible, the fatal truth was that she made everything too difficult—or that this, at any rate, was how she enjoyed the exquisite privilege of affecting him. She watched him, she saw him splash to keep from sinking, with a pitiless cold sweet irony; she gave him rope as a syren on a headland might have been amused at some bather beyond his depth and unable to swim. It was all the fault—his want of ease was—of the real extravagance of his idea of not letting her spy even the tip of the tail of any "freedom" with her ”

“ Puddick isn't beautiful,—though he has a fine little head and a face with some awfully good marks; but he's a Greek god, for statuesque calm, compared with us. He isn't afraid of her."
Jane drew herself elegantly up. "I understood you just now that it's exactly what he is!"
Traffle reflected. "That's only for his having to deal with her in our way. Not if he handles her in his own." ”

“ Three days having elapsed, however, he had to feel that things had considerably moved, on his being privileged to hear his wife, in the drawing-room, where they entertained Mr Puddick at tea, put the great question straighter to that visitor than he himself, Sidney Traffle, could either have planned or presumed to do. Flushed to a fever after they had beat about the bush a little, Jane didn't flinch from her duty. "What I want to know, in plain terms, if you please, is whether or no you're Mora's lover?" ”

“ No, he wouldn't give Jane away now—he'd suffer anything instead; the taste of what he should have to suffer was already there on his lips—it came over him, to the strangest effect of desolation, of desolation made certain, that they should have lost Mora for ever, and that this present scant passage must count for them as her form of rupture. Jane had treated her the other day—treated her, that is, through Walter Puddick, who would have been, when all was said, a faithful agent—to their form, their form save on the condition attached, much too stiff a one, no doubt ”

“ That ministered positively to his weakness—the justice he did on the spot to the rare shade of human felicity, human impunity, human sublimity, call it what one would, surely dwelling in such a consciousness. How could a girl have to think long, have to think more than three-quarters of a second, under any stress whatever, of anything in the world but that her presence was an absolute incomparable value? ”

“ We've been, you see, too stupid about her. Puddick doesn't say it, but he knows it,—that I felt. She feels what she is,—and so does he."
"What she is? She's an awful little person,"—and Mrs Traffle stated it with a cold finality she had never yet used.
"Well, then, that's what she feels!—even though it's probably not the name she employs in connection with it. She has tremendously the sense of life."
"That's bad," cried Jane, "when you haven't—not even feebly—the sense of decency."
"How do you know, my dear," he returned, "when you've never had it?" ”

“ Puddick had an undissimulated pause for the renewed effort to do justice to so much elegant arrangement of the stiff truth of his case; but his intelligence apparently operated, and even to the extent of showing him that his companion really meant, more and more, as well—as well, that is, to him—as it was humanly conceivable that Mrs Traffle's husband could mean. "Your difficulty's different from mine, and from the appearance I incur in carrying Miss Montravers her aunt's message as a clear necessity and at any risk." ”

“ I've come to you, quite in the dark, because of Mr Traffle's letter, and so that you shouldn't have the shadow of anything to complain of. But please remember that I've neither appealed to you in any way, nor put myself in a position of responsibility toward you."
So far, but only so far, however, had he successfully proceeded before Jane was down upon him,in her new trenchant form. "It's not of your responsibility to us I'm talking, but all of your responsibility to her. We efface ourselves," she all effectively bridled, "and we're prepared for every reasonable sacrifice. ”

“ He keeps his advantage, he thinks, by not forcing the note,—don't you see?" Traffle himself—under the quick glow of his rush—actually saw, more and more. "He's feeling his way,—he used that expression to me; and again, I haven't to tell you, any more than he really had to tell me, that with Mora one has to sit tight. He puts on us, in short, the responsibility." ”

“ He threw up helpless arms, he dropped them while he gazed at her. "It doesn't seem to me possible any one can ever have questioned your gift for doing things in your own way. And if you're now married," he added with his return of tentative presumption and his strained smile, "your own way opens out for you, doesn't it? as never yet."
Her eyes, on this, held him a moment, and he couldn't have said now what was in them. "I think it does. I'm seeing," she said—"I shall see. Only"—she hesitated but for an instant—"for that it's necessary you shall look after him." ”

“ Never was a scandal, therefore, less scandalous—more naturally a disappointment, that is, to our good friends, whose resentment of this holy calm, this absence of any echo of any convulsion, of any sensation of any kind to be picked up, strikes me as ushering in the only form of ostracism our dissimulated taint, our connection with lurid facts that might have gone on making us rather eminently worth while, will have earned for us. ”

“ They had brought him there at the very best to patronise him, and now would simply have to reckon with his showing clearly for so much more a person "of the world" than they. Traffle, it was true, was becoming, under the precious initiation opened to him by Mora, whether directly or indirectly, much more a man of the world than ever yet: as much as that at least he could turn over in his secret soul while their visitor pursued. ”