Henry James

“ I want a disparity, but not too great, at the same time that though I want her a Girl, I want her not too young a one either. Everything about her, her intelligence, character, sense of life and knowledge of it, imply a certain experience and a certain time for that. The great fact is that she is the poor Girl, and the "exceptionally clever," in a society of the rich, living her life with them, and more or less by their bounty; being, I seem to see, already a friend and protégée of Rosanna's, though it isn't Rosanna but the Bradhams who put her in relation with Gray, whether designedly or not. ”

“ Horton asked, "that I'm a grand amoureux?"
Well, Gray had but to consult his memory of their young days together; there was the admission, under pressure, that he might have confused the appearances. "They were at any rate always up and at you—which seems to have left me with the impression that your life is full of them."
"Every man's life is full of them that has a door or a window they can come in by. But the question's of yourself," said Haughty, "and just exactly of the number of such that you'll have to keep open or shut in the immense façade you'll now present." ”

“ She pressed to Rosanna straight, as if nothing as yet had had time to pass between them—which very little in fact had; with the result for our young woman of feeling helped, by the lightest of turns, not to be awkward herself, or really, what came to the same thing, not to be anything herself. It was a fine perception she had had before—of how Cissy could on occasion "do" for one, and this, all extraordinarily and in a sort of double sense, by quenching one in her light at the very moment she offered it for guidance. ”

“ Rosanna said, "I do care what becomes of Mr. Fielder, and I trust you enough, being as you are the only one of your lot I do trust, to help me perhaps a little to do something about it."
"Oh, my dear lady, I'm not a bit discreet, you know," Mr. Bradham amusedly protested; "I'm perfectly unprincipled and utterly indelicate. How can a fellow not be who likes as much as I do at all times to make the kettle boil and the plot thicken? I've only got my beautiful intelligence, though, as I say, I don't in the least want to embroil you. ”

“ Bradham had exercised her great function of social appraiser by staring and then, as under conclusions drawn from it, giving way. One might have found it redeemingly soft in her that before this particular suggestion she could melt, or that in other words Cissy appeared the single fact in all the world about which she had anything to call imagination. She imagined her, she imagined her now, and as dealing somehow with their massive friend; which consciousness, on the latter's part, it must be said, played for the moment through everything else. ”

“ Horton had, with a quickened pace, disappeared; and she had before answering cast about over the fair face of the great house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with dressing-time glimmers from upper windows flushing it here and there like touches of pink paint in an elegant evening complexion. "Oh I care for the dead man, I'm afraid, only because it's the living who appeals. I don't want him to like it."
"To like——?" Davey was again at a loss. "What on earth?"
"Why all that ugliness and bareness, that poverty of form." ”

“ The difference between our pair, thus confronted, might have been felt as the greater by the very fact of their outward likeness as creatures so materially weighted; it would have been written all over Rosanna for the considering eye that every grain of her load, from innermost soul to outermost sense, was that of reality and sincerity; whereas it might by the same token have been felt of Davey that in the temperature of life as he knew it his personal identity had been, save for perhaps some small tough lurking residuum, long since puffed away in pleasant spirals of vapour. ”

“ Horton added, "that I've no time to waste with you on sophistry that isn't so much as plausible." He stopped a moment, his hands in his pockets, his head thrown all but extravagantly back, so that his considering look might have seemed for the time to descend from a height designed a little to emphasise Gray's comparative want of stature. That young man's own eyes remained the while, none the less, unresentfully raised; to such an effect indeed that, after some duration of this exchange, the bigger man's fine irony quite visibly shaded into a still finer, and withal frankly kinder, curiosity. ”

“ Charming, by which I mean such interesting, things resident in what I there touch on; with the way they look at each other, Rosanna and Gray, if one is talking about looks. Gray keeps it in comedy, so far as he can—making a tone, a spell, that Rosanna doesn't break into, as she breaks, anything to call really breaks, into nothing as yet: I seem to see the final, from-far-back-prepared moment when she does, for the first and last time, break as of a big and beautiful value. ”

“ Gray had a sharp gesture. "If there's a person in the world whom I don't call a façade——!"
"You don't call her one?"—Haughty took it right up. And he added as for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man——!"
"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.
Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this time to a light, wait in silence for his word. ”

“ Gray felt in the hand's tenure a small emphasizing lift of the arm, while the head moved a little as off toward the world they spoke of—which amounted for our young man, however, but to a glance at all the outside harmony and prosperity, bathed as these now seemed in the colour of the flushed sky. Absurd altogether that he should be in any way enlisted against such things. His entertainer, all the same, continued to see the reference and to point it. "The enormous preponderance of money. Money is their life." ”

“ She had had time to articulate for Horton's benefit, with no more than due distinctness, that he must have seen them, and Horton had as quickly found the right note and the right wit for the simple reassurance "Oh Davey——!" As occupants of a place of procrastination that they only were not such fools as to leave unhaunted they frankly received their visitor, any impulse in whom to sprinkle stale banter on their search for solitude would have been forestalled, even had it been supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by the instant action of his younger guest's strategic curiosity. ”

“ Gray returned; "for the situation to have a sense, I take it, one must sit in one's tower alone. And I should properly say," he added after an hesitation, "that mine is the one object, all round me here, that I don't owe my uncle: it has been placed at my disposition, in the handsomest way in the world, by Rosanna Gaw."
"Ah that does increase the interest—even if susceptible of seeming to mean, to one's bewilderment, that it's the sort of thing she would like to thrust you away into; which I hope, however, is far from the case. Does she then keep ivory towers, a choice assortment?" ”

“ Bradham's great idea—notoriously the most disinterested Gussy had been known, through a career rich in announced intentions and glorious designs, to entertain with any coherence—was that by placing and keeping on exhibition, under her eye, the loveliest flower of girlhood a splendid and confident society could have wished to wear on its bosom she should at once signally enhance the dignity of the social part played by herself and steep the precious object in a medium in which the care of precious objects was supremely understood. ”

“ Northover, will have told you. That's curious and charming," Cissy went on, "and I want awfully we should talk of it. But it isn't what I mean by what I know—and what you don't, my dear thing!"
Rosanna couldn't have told why, but she had begun to tremble, and also to try not to show it. "What I don't know—about Gray Fielder? Why, of course there's plenty!" she smiled.
Cissy still held her hands; but Cissy now was grave. "No, there isn't plenty—save so far as what I mean is enough. And I haven't told it to Gussy. It's too good for her," the girl added. "It's too good for anyone but you." ”

“ A tremendous Joint is formed, in all this connection, when the first definite question begins to glimmer upon Gray, under some intimation, suggestion, impression, springing up as dramatically as I can make it, as to what Horton is really doing with him, and as to whether or no he shall really try to find out. That question of whether or no he shall becomes the question; just as the way he answers it, not all at once, but under further impressions invoked, becomes a thing of the liveliest interest for us ”

“ But I don't know if you feel how interesting it's all going to be; in fact if you know yourself how wonderful it is that he has already—Mr. Fielder has, I mean—such a tremendous friend in Cissy."
Rosanna waited, facing her, noting her extraordinary perfections of neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation of care. ”

“ I've been trying here, day after day, as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for anything; and yet I remain, don't you see? a wretched little worm."
"Deary, deary me," stared Horton, "that you should have to bring up your appreciation of it from such depths! You go in for it as you would for the electric light or the telephone, and then find half-way that you can't stand the expense and want the next-door man somehow to combine with you?"
"That's exactly it, Vinty, and you're the next-door man!"—Gray embraced the analogy with glee. ”

“ He is beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments, all scandalised states; he is amused at what he himself does, at his general and particular effect and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation, as it were, and whom I somehow seem to want to show him feel as the only person in the whole medium appreciating his genius; in other words his detached play of mind and the deep "American humour" of it. Don't I seem to want him even as asking for something rather big?—a kind of a lump of a sum which Gray, always with amusement, answers that he will have to see about. ”

“ Which made Graham turn away, move about in vagueness of impatience and, still panting and still hesitating for other expression, approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big chimneypiece, reach for a box that raised a presumption of cigarettes and, the next instant, thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The latter's welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray's own notice of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook, before the box went back to its shelf. ”

“ Bradham would deeply have resented—as deeply as a woman might who had no depth—any imputation on her view of what would be fine and great for her young friend, but Rosanna's envy and admiration of possibilities, to say nothing of actualities, to which this view was quite blind, kept the girl before her at times as a sacrificed, truly an even prostituted creature; who yet also, it had to be added, could often alienate sympathy by strange, by perverse concurrences. ”

“ What I seem to like to have at all events is that Gray and Cissy, have not met, yet have been in this indirect relation—complicated further by the fact of her existing "friendship", say, as a temporary name for it, with Horton Vint. She arrives thus with her curiosity, her recollections, her intelligence—for, there's no doubt about it, I am, rather as usual, offering a group of the personally remarkable, in a high degree, all round. Augusta Bradham, really, is about the only stupid one, the only approach to a fool, though she too in her way is a force, a driving one—that is the whole point ”

“ It is with this formula that Horton meets the world all the while—the world that at a given moment can only find itself so full of wonderment and comment. It is with it above all that he meets Cissy, who takes it from him in a way that absolutely helps him to keep it up; and it would be with it that he should meet Rosanna if, after a given day or season, he might find it in him to dare, as it were, to "meet" Rosanna at all. It is with Horton's formula, which I think I finally show him as quite publicly delighting in, that Gray himself meets Rosanna, whom he meets a great deal all this time ”

“ And who, when I bethink myself, have his contacts been with, after all, over there, but Horty and Rosanna—the relation to Mr. Betterman being but of the mere essence. Of the people who matter the Bradhams are new to him, and that is all right; Cissy may have been seen of him on some occasion over there that is quite recent, as recent as I like; all the more that I must remember how if I want her truly a Girl I must mind what I'm about with the age I'm attributing to Gray. ”

“ The grave beauty of the personal presence, the vague anticipation as of something that might go on to be commemorated for its example, the great pure fragrant room, bathed in the tempered glow of the afternoon's end, the general lucidity and tranquillity and security of the whole presented case, begot in fine, on our young friend's part, an extraordinary sense that as he himself was important enough to be on show, so these peculiar perfections that met him were but so many virtual honours rendered and signs of the high level to which he had mounted. ”

“ Deep was the discomfort for Miss Gaw of losing with her entertainer the commonest advantage she perhaps knew, that of her habit of escape from the relation of dislike, let alone of hostility, through some active denial for the time of any relation at all. What was there in Gussy that rendered impossible to Rosanna's sense this very vulgarest of luxuries? She gave her always the impression of looking at her with an exaggeration of ease, a guarded penetration, that consciously betrayed itself ”

“ Gray went on, "I don't in the least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised as, one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I were a much greater one"—he gathered force—"my appearance of it would depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more room than may suit your taste. ”

“ Only don't I seem to want it that Gussie's fortune, besides not having been even remotely comparable to Rosanna's, is, though with a fair outward face, a dilapidated and undermined quantity, much ravaged by Gussie's violent strain upon it, and representing thus, through her general enormous habit and attitude, an association and connection with the money world, but all the more characteristically so, for Gray as he begins to see, that almost everything but the pitch of Gussie's wants and arrangements and ideals has been chucked, as it were, out of its windows and doors. ”

“ Horton again looked at him long and frankly; this subject of appeal might indeed for the moment have been as embarrassed between the various requisitions of response as Gray had just before shown himself. But as the tide could surge for one of the pair so it could surge for the other, and the large truth of what Horton most grasped appeared as soon as he had spoken. "The name of your complaint, you poor dear delightful person, or the name at least of your necessity, your predicament and your solution, is marriage to a wife at short order. ”

“ Predatory on the very rich, that is; with Gussie's insistence that Gray shall be and shall proceed as quite one of the very, oh the very, very, exactly in order that she may so prey? Yes and so it is that Gray learns—so it is that a part of Davey's abysses of New York financial history, is his own, their own, but his in particular, abyss of inconvenience, abyss of inability to keep it up combined with all the social impossibility of not doing so. ”

“ Vulgar theft I don't want, but I want something to which Horty is led on and encouraged by Gray's whole attitude and state of mind face to face with the impression which he gets over there of so many of the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions. ”

“ I want to work it up and develop it—I assure you on my honour I do. I've lashed myself up into feeling that if I don't I shall be a base creature, a worm of worms, as I say, and fit only to be utterly ashamed. But that's where you come in. You'll help me to develop. To develop my capacity I mean," he explained with a wondrous candour.
Horton was now, small marvel, all clear faith; even, the cigarettes helping, to the verge again of hilarity. "Your capacity—I see. Not so much your property itself."
"Well"—Gray considered of it—"what will my property be except my capacity?" ”

“ She sees the improvement in Horton's situation, she assists at it, it gives her pleasure, it even to a certain extent causes her wonder, but a wonder which the pleasure only perches on, so to speak, and converts to its use; so does the vision appeal to her and hold her of the exercise on his part, the more vivid exercise than any she has yet been able to enjoy an exhibition of, of the ability and force, the doing and man-of-action quality, as to the show of which he has up to now been so hampered. She likes his success at last, plainly, and he has it from her that she likes it ”

“ Even for his own ear "What indeed?" was thus the ironic implication—which he felt himself quite grimace to show he should have understood somebody else's temptation to make. Here, however, where his uncle's smile might pertinently have broadened, the graver blandness settled again, leaving him in face of it but the more awkwardly assured. He felt as if he couldn't say enough to abate the ugliness of that—and perhaps it even did come out to the fact of beauty that no profession of the decent could appear not to coincide with the very candour of the greedy. ”