Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Editors’ Preface
- General Chronology of James’s Life and Writings
- Introduction
- Textual Introduction
- Chronology of Composition and Production
- Bibliography
- The Princess Casamassima
- Glossary of Foreign Words and Phrases
- Notes
- Textual Variants I: Substantive Variants up to Copy Text
- Textual Variants II: Substantive Variants after Copy Text
- Emendations
- Appendix: Preface to New York Edition
XXXIV
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Editors’ Preface
- General Chronology of James’s Life and Writings
- Introduction
- Textual Introduction
- Chronology of Composition and Production
- Bibliography
- The Princess Casamassima
- Glossary of Foreign Words and Phrases
- Notes
- Textual Variants I: Substantive Variants up to Copy Text
- Textual Variants II: Substantive Variants after Copy Text
- Emendations
- Appendix: Preface to New York Edition
Summary
How right she had been to say that Lady Aurora would probably be fascinated at first was proved the first time Hyacinth went to Belgrave Square, a visit he was led to pay very promptly, by a deep sense of the obligations under which her ladyship had placed him at the time of Pinnie's death. The circumstances in which he found her were quite the same as those of his visit the year before; she was spending the unfashionable season in her father's empty house, amid a desert of brown holland and the dormant echoes of heavy conversation. He had seen so much of her during Pinnie's illness that he felt (or had felt then) that he knew her almost intimately — that they had become real friends, almost comrades, and might meet henceforth without reserves or ceremonies; yet she was as fluttered and awkward as she had been on the other occasion: not distant, but entangled in new coils of shyness and apparently unmindful of what had happened to draw them closer. Hyacinth, however, always liked extremely to be with her, for she was the person in the world who quietly, delicately, and as a matter of course treated him most like a gentleman. She had never said the handsome, flattering things to him that had fallen from the lips of the Princess, and never explained to him her view of him; but her timid, cursory, receptive manner, which took all sorts of equalities for granted, was a homage to the idea of his refinement. It was in this manner that she now conversed with him on the subject of his foreign travels; he found himself discussing the political indications of Paris and the Ruskinian theories of Venice, in Belgrave Square, quite like one of the cosmopolites bred in that region. It took him, however, but a few minutes to perceive that Lady Aurora's heart was not in these considerations; the deferential smile she bent upon him, while she sat with her head thrust forward and her long hands clasped in her lap, was slightly mechanical, her attitude perfunctory.
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- The Princess Casamassima , pp. 336 - 343Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020