The Sense of the Past

THE SENSE OF THE PAST, _the second of the two novels which Henry James left unfinished, had been planned and begun some years before he died. The two first books and a part of t...

Her pause had this time more visible thought. "Nowhere you most want. Oh," she declared, "I know what you most want and what you've a thousand reasons for wanting. I know just w...

"Live up to them," she returned as if she had not heard him. "You won't do anything else." She said it with a shortness that was almost stern, and he felt, detestably, as if she...

That beneficiary, in the form of his American cousin, so rejoiced in such an inference that, during the first few days, he hung about under cover of night, and with mingled diff...

There were questions--more even than he could meet--that came up for him in the act of absence; but these questions either practically answered themselves by contact, or, so far...

This act employed him, thanks to the bunchy wick, a minute or two; but no sooner was the little flame assured and he had raised aloft the glimmering torch than he was filled wit...

"I see I'm an impression to you--and of course an extraordinary one; but he wasn't one to me," Ralph pursued, "in any such sense as that--for the interest of our relation, as yo...

He had been touched in the hall and on the staircase as by the faint odd brush of a suggestion that what was before his eyes during certain seconds had already been before them...

"I beheld the wonder, and I took it completely in," Ralph instantly answered, "the minute I clapped eyes on the elegant portrait that reached us in New York some time back, of c...

What overtook him further withal, a few moments later, was that if he shouldn't be able to keep it down the measure of his new luxury might so keep itself up as to overstrain al...

"I hope to heaven I shan't let you see it if I am!" he interrupted. "And you and your brother must remember at any rate that though the natives of Mexico and Peru, when first di...

"Yes, my dear," Ralph at once declared, "it certainly can't be said that I've made any stranger of you!" He took her reminders and gave her back for them proportionate vows--in...

"It's perfectly true, mother"--and the girl kept it up at her friend; "he has made me say more of them in the last half hour, not to speak of doing 'em, the happy wretch, than i...

"Ah nobody could be more civil," Mrs. Midmore interposed, "and very few, I assure you, cousin, are so clever and so keen. But surely, as he doesn't come up, you should wait on h...

Sir Cantopher was struck--and Ralph was at once struck, as well, with his being so: he had put his fine finger so straight upon the spot where our young man's consciousness then...

"I like your free talk--I like it, I like it!" Molly broke in at this. "I wouldn't have it a bit different, though we have certainly never heard anything like it in all our live...

This was not prolonged, and yet Ralph could note, for his bewilderment, that some time must already have elapsed, since there came in to him by the open door, from hall or stair...

"'Greater'----?" She hung again on this term as she had done before; but it was as if something had happened since then, and she now met his idea in time. "Won't it be that you'...

[1] The Ambassador _does_ of course think him a curious and interesting case of dementia, feels a kind of superior responsibility about him accordingly, is really in a manner "f...

I catch, it seems to me, with a certain amount of vision already two or three, not to say three or four, of my essential hinges or, as I have called 'em, _clous_, that mark the...

Well then, there he is with the question of the marriage ended--as to which, let me catch myself up to remember, I shall have to give _her_ a motive, a presentable ground, since...

Definite it is then that, caught by his young friend in the fact of his _intelligent_ alarm he makes a clean breast to her of what he feels and understands, of what his intellig...

The "sacrifice", the indispensable, unspeakable sacrifice, on the girl's part, is involved in her relation to Ralph as she now knows him, and the quintessential "drama" of it, s...