[The Golden Bowl by Henry James]@TWC D-Link bookThe Golden Bowl PART FOURTH 9/263
That, all the same, was what had happened; it had been bitten into her mind, all in an hour, that nothing she had ever done would hereafter, in some way yet to be determined, so count for her--perhaps not even what she had done in accepting, in their old golden Rome, Amerigo's proposal of marriage.
And yet, by her little crouching posture there, that of a timid tigress, she had meant nothing recklessly ultimate, nothing clumsily fundamental; so that she called it names, the invidious, the grotesque attitude, holding it up to her own ridicule, reducing so far as she could the portee of what had followed it.
She had but wanted to get nearer--nearer to something indeed that she couldn't, that she wouldn't, even to herself, describe; and the degree of this achieved nearness was what had been in advance incalculable.
Her actual multiplication of distractions and suppressions, whatever it did for her, failed to prevent her living over again any chosen minute--for she could choose them, she could fix them--of the freshness of relation produced by her having administered to her husband the first surprise to which she had ever treated him. It had been a poor thing, but it had been all her own, and the whole passage was backwardly there, a great picture hung on the wall of her daily life, for her to make what she would of. It fell, for retrospect, into a succession of moments that were WATCHABLE still; almost in the manner of the different things done during a scene on the stage, some scene so acted as to have left a great impression on the tenant of one of the stalls.
Several of these moments stood out beyond the others, and those she could feel again most, count again like the firm pearls on a string, had belonged more particularly to the lapse of time before dinner--dinner which had been so late, quite at nine o'clock, that evening, thanks to the final lateness of Amerigo's own advent.
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