The flash of this knowledge – for it was knowledge in the midst of dread – produced in me the most extraordinary effect.
The day lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees.
His egotism lay like a serpent in a bank of flowers.
Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.’ ‘They would uncommonly suit you,’ he frankly returned. ‘Oh yes, I see myself!
The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements – an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.
He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply – for that was the only way to see it – been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.
I never was what I should be.
An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.
She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There.
She sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had led no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life.
Do you know I sometimes think that I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.
Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.
I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm.
His very quietness was part of it now, as always part of everything, of his success, his originality, his modesty, his exquisite public perversity, his inscrutable incalculable energy; and this quality perhaps it might be – all the more too as the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable traceable effort – that placed him in her eyes as no precious work of art probably had ever been placed in his own.
Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates.
This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her companion’s inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting too familiarly that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It.
We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger.
There may be unselfish natures, there may be disinterested feelings.
Even iron sometimes melts.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my horrid plunge.