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eBook Category: Classic Literature
eBook Description: A classic short story by Henry James.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com/Fictionwise Classic, Published: 1892
Fictionwise Release Date: February 2004

This eBook is also available in the following bundle(s):

• Fictionwise Classics [Authors H-Z Bundle]

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [50 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [100 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [34 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [133 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [39 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [109 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [104 KB] , hiebook (KML) [110 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [56 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [32 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [40 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [68 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [54 KB]
Words: 12212
Reading time: 34-48 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing ENABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

CHAPTER I.

"I wondered whether you wouldn't read it to me," said Mrs. Alsager, as they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave. She looked down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm. Her charm was always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of her house, which was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling that he always made several false starts before departure. He had spent some such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, golden drawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of the worries of his life, that it had come to be the immediate answer to his longings, the cure for his aches, the harbour of refuge from his storms. His tribulations were not unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a usual kind, were marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one so young, and very independent for one so poor. He was eight-and-twenty, but he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities and disappointments. The opportunity to talk of some of these in Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of London. This inconvenience took for him principally the line of insensibility to Allan Wayworth's literary form. He had a literary form, or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the circumstance was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have administered. She was even more literary and more artistic than he, inasmuch as he could often work off his overflow (this was his occupation, his profession), while the generous woman, abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and unpublished, stood there in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain in the plash of the marble basin.