Henry James

The Sacred Fount Henry James

Book Excerpt: ... Oert always expert; the latter straightway pulled up, however, making me as welcome as if their converse had dropped. She was extraordinarily pretty, markedly responsive, conspicuously charming, but he gave me a look that really seemed to say: "Don't--there's a good fellow--leave me any longer alone with her!" I had met her at Newmarch before--it was indeed only so that I had met her--and I knew how she was valued there. I also knew that an aversion to pretty women--numbers of whom he had preserved for a grateful posterity--was his sign neither as man nor as artist; the effect of all of which was to make me ask myself what she could have been doing to him. Making love, possibly--yet from that he would scarce have appealed. She wouldn't, on the other hand, have given him her company only to be inhuman. I joined them, at all events, learning from Mrs. Server that she had come by a train previous to my own; and we made a slow trio till, at a turn of the prospect, we came upon another group. It consisted of Mrs...