The Golden Bowl — Complete

He stood with his hands in his pockets; he had carried his eyes to the fragments on the chimney-piece, and she could already distinguish the element of relief, absolutely of suc...

“Well,” she continued, “I don’t feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I’ve made the difference for you, I must think of the difference.”

She stood there with her eyes on him, doubling the telegram together as if it had been a precious thing and yet all the while holding her breath. Of a sudden, somehow, and quite...

“Twenty changes, if you like—all sorts of things. She dresses, really, Maggie does, as much for her father—and she always did—as for her husband or for herself. She has her room...

It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen to thinking of her father’s birthday, had given herself this as a reason for trying what she could pick...

“Oh, that isn’t so. It’s I that am old. You ARE young.” This was what she had at first answered—and quite in the tone too of having taken her minutes. It had not been wholly to...

He raised his eyebrows at her—he wonderfully smiled. “What you came back from America to ask? Ah, certainly then, I must find the hour!” He wonderfully smiled, but it was rather...

She had this morning a wonderful consciousness both of dreading a particular question from him and of being able to check, yes even to disconcert, magnificently, by her apparent...

It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very much as if she was invited by it to s...

Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too narrow and too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth, on the other hand, by no means small, with substance in its l...

Charlotte had brought this out with the richness, almost, of gaiety; and Maggie, to go on, had to think, with her own intensity, of Amerigo—to think how he, on his side, had had...

It wasn’t that she wished she had been of the remembered party and possessed herself of its secrets; for she didn’t care about its secrets—she could concern herself at present,...

“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. “I s...

Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was, on the spot, another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alig...

Fanny’s idea was clearly, to begin with, that her young friend had taken her breath away; but she looked at her very straight and very hard. “Do you speak from a suspicion of yo...

Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased to be right—that is, to be confident—o...

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state...

He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes rested, as they had already often done, on the brave darker wash of far-away watercolour that represented the...

“English society,” as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed of a shining star, a decorati...

They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his colour rise; it was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image, the enacted scene, of her passage...

That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed—he feeling all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He might get on with things as they were,...

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of what the Prince might be or might do for his son—the sum of service, in his absence, so completely filled itself...

“Why, this—that she couldn’t tell her.” And she explained a little what she meant. “There are things, my dear—haven’t you felt it yourself, coarse as you are?—that no one could...

Nothing in fact was stranger than the way in which, when she had remained there a little, her companions, watched by her through one of the windows, actually struck her as almos...

Charlotte had for a moment a pause; it had continued to come to her that really to have her case “out,” as they said, with the person in the world to whom her most intimate diff...

It was her one purely good fortune that she could feel thus sure impertinence—to HER at any rate—was not among the arts on which he proposed to throw himself; for though he had,...

It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to make of being, of truly having been at any time, “with” his wife: that reflection she was not exempt from...

“FOR the Prince. And with the others,” she went on. “With Mr. Verver—wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms”—she had to do even THEM justice—“are two-thirds of co...

Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October, there had been a full word or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other voices—a word or two that affect...

Her rejoinder to this was to wait—though by no means as long as he meant. When at the end of her minute she spoke, however, it was mildly too. “What would you like, dear friend,...

The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily contained—these facts themselves were the immens...

It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife, when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had so broken—and he had even made out at...

He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. “Ah, I haven’t your courage. Moreover,” he laughed, “it seems to me that, so...

By the end of a week, the week that had begun, especially, with her morning hour, in Eaton Square, between her father and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treate...

“Not, at any rate, to care for me as you cared for Amerigo and for Charlotte. They were much more interesting—it was perfectly natural. How couldn’t you like Amerigo?” Maggie co...

Ah, there it was again, for Maggie—the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her fathe...

Amerigo was away from her again, as she sat there, as she walked there without him—for she had, with the difference of his presence in the house, ceased to keep herself from mov...

That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence and yet another of their hours toget...

So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads of gaping neighbours; so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing, as less interested judges might h...

A strange impulse was sharp in her, but it was not, for her part, the desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as she could have slept that morning, days befor...

Then, after an instant—and only after an instant, as she saw—he made out what she meant; and it gave her, all strangely enough, the still further light that Charlotte, for herse...

He had spoken with cheer, but it appeared to drop before this reassurance, as if the latter overdid his alarm, and that should be corrected. “Oh, my dear, I’ve always thought of...

“Ah, my dear!” he vaguely protested. Their entertainer, meanwhile, stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her...

Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his walk. It would have been ridiculous—such a moral from such a source—if it hadn’t all somehow fitted to the...

“Only ours—most probably. Speriamo.” To which, as after hushed connections, he presently added: “Poor Fanny!” But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand, turned...

On this, for a little, they sat face to face; after which, without comment, she asked him if he would have more tea. All she would give him, he promptly signified; and he develo...

If Mrs. Verver meanwhile, then, had struck her as determined in a certain direction by the last felicity into which that night had flowered, our young woman was yet not to fail...

With which therefore they stood at difference, he with his head erect and his happy idea perched, in its eagerness, on his crest. “And how then is she to know?”

Fanny was meanwhile frequent, it appeared, in Eaton Square; so much he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at tea-time, during the same period, in Por...

“Your reputation THERE? You’ve given it up to them, the awful people, for less than nothing; you’ve given it up to them to tear to pieces, to make their horrible vulgar jokes ag...