Explore "The Author of Beltraffio" by Henry James on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MRS. AMBIENT left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few / words with her husband that I didn't hear and that ended in her taking / the child by the hand and returning with him to the house. Her husband / joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit conscious and / constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he would show me / my room. In looking back upon these first moments of my visit I find it / important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all fully measured / his situation from the first or made out the signs of things mastered / only afterwards. This later knowledge throws a backward light and makes / me forget that, at least on the occasion of my present reference-I mean / that first afternoon-Mark Ambient struck me as only enviable. Allowing / for this he must yet have failed of much expression as we walked back to / the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine / on his small son.
"That's an extraordinary little boy of yours. I've never seen such a / child."