Read "The Figure in the Carpet" by Henry James online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
RETURNING to town I feverishly collected them all; I picked out each in its order and held it up to the light. This gave me a maddening month, in the course of which several things took place. One of these, the last, I may as well immediately mention, was that I acted on Vereker's advice: I renounced my ridiculous attempt. I could really make nothing of the business; it proved a dead loss. After all I had always, as he had himself noted, liked him; and what now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them.
Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I _had_ no knowledge -- nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it -- they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion -- perversely, I allow -- by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose.