Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page A

as you really are! I think we’ve all arrived by this time at the right word for that: ‘You’re beautiful—n’en parlons plus.’ d You’re as beautiful as ever—you look lovely.” He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as she knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating, sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass he had reached, could give him pleasure, and had come back on these occasions to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome, that she was in her way a tangible value. It was at least as marked, nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as they were similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome, but he certainly didn’t care. The hitch here of course was that, with whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four bouncing children, had no such measure. She asked him the next thing how long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how little it mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably have in common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer, truthful or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her own side to say to him. This was really what had made her wait—what superseded the small remainder of her resentment at his constant practical impertinence; the result of all of which was that within a minute she had brought it out. “Yes—even now I’m willing to go with you. I don’t know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if you hadn’t written you would within a day or two have heard from me. Things have happened, and I’ve only waited, for seeing you, till I should be quite sure. I am quite sure. I’ll go with you.”
    It produced an effect. “Go with me where?”
    “Anywhere. I’ll stay with you. Even here.” She had taken off her gloves and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.
    Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way—hovered there as if looking, in consequence of her words, for a pretext to back out easily: on which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called, what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him, still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means been to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a straw for his embarrassment—feeling how little, on her own part, she was moved by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many attitudes that she could now deprive him quite without compunction of the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone as he said: “Oh my child, I can never consent to that!”
    “What then are you going to do?”
    “I’m turning it over,” said Lionel Croy. “You may imagine if I’m not thinking.”
    “Haven’t you thought then,” his daughter asked, “of what I speak of? I mean of my being ready.”
    Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. “No—I haven’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.” It was so respectable a show that she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair at home, how little, his appearance ever by any chance told about him. His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother’s crosses; inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that was horrid—thank