Henry James

The Jolly Corner Henry James

"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon; "and I make answer as Ican-begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter toany of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way sosilly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about somethingthat concerns only myself." He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of monthsnow he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, thiscomfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the firstplace in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belatedreturn to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had solong and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin forplay. He had given them more than thirty years-thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed tohim to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twentythree on leaving New York-he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he hadsometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longerthan is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and saidalso to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than thoseeven of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, aboveall the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.