Explore "The Middle Years" by Henry James on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It left me moreover, I become aware -- or at least it now leaves me -- fingering the loose ends of this particular free stretch of my tapestry; so that, with my perhaps even extravagant aversion to loose ends, I can but try for a moment to interweave them. There dangles again for me least confusedly, I think, the vision of a dinner at Mrs. Greville's -- and I like even to remember that Cadogan Place, where memories hang thick for me, was the scene of it -- which took its light from the presence of Louisa Lady Waterford, who took hers in turn from that combination of rare beauty with rare talent which the previous Victorian age had for many years not ceased to acclaim.
It insists on coming back to me with the utmost vividness that Lady Waterford was illustrational, historically, preciously so, meeting one's largest demand for the blest recovery, when possible, of some glimmer of the sense of personal beauty, to say nothing of personal "accomplishment," as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it. Scarce to be sated that form of wonder, to my own imagination, I confess -- so that I fairly believe there was no moment at which I wouldn't have been ready to turn my back for the time even on the most triumphant actuality of form and feature if a chance apprehension of a like force as it played on the sensibility of the past had competed.