The Golden Bowl — Complete

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Генри Джеймс. The Golden Bowl — Complete

BOOK FIRST: THE PRINCE

PART FIRST

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

PART SECOND

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

PART THIRD

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

BOOK SECOND: THE PRINCESS

PART FOURTH

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

PART FIFTH

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

PART SIXTH

XL

XLI

XLII

Отрывок из книги

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 than any they have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories. The young man’s movements, however, betrayed no consistency of attention—not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince’s undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. He was too restless—that was the fact—for any concentration, and the last idea that would just now have occurred to him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.

“You know I think he’s a REAL galantuomo—‘and no mistake.’ There are plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

.....

“Oh, I daresay,” the Colonel laughed. “They generally don’t!”

“At all events,” his wife pursued, “she escaped—they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn’t be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines between them the better. It had taken them, it is true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known—though it was a good deal known. More, certainly,” she said, “than I then imagined—though I don’t know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he might have done—things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I haven’t”—and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures—“so I haven’t, I say to myself, been a fool.”

.....