Daisy Miller and An International Episode (Oxford World's Classics) by James Henry

Author:James, Henry [James, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

IV

IN point of fact, as the latter would have said, Mrs Westgate disembarked by the next mid-May on the British coast. She was accompanied by her sister, but unattended by any other member of her family. To the lost comfort of a husband respectably to produce, as she phrased it, she was now habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys to Europe under this drawback of looking ill-temperedly separated and yet of being thanklessly enslaved, and she still decently accounted for her spurious singleness to wondering friends on this side of the Atlantic by formulating the grim truth—the only grimness indeed in all her view—that in America there is no leisure-class. The two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones’s Hotel, where Mrs Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting. Bessie Alden had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the ‘associations’ would carry her away and counted on the joy of treating her eyes and her imagination to all the things she had read of in poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of associations, of relics and reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the great English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a swarm of fresh emotions. They began very promptly—these tender fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded, deer-peopled parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light, the speech, the manners, all the significant differences. Mrs Westgate’s response was of course less quick and less extravagant, and she gave but a wandering attention to her sister’s ejaculations and rhapsodies.

‘You know my enjoyment of England’s not so intellectual as Bessie’s,’ she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this country. ‘And yet if it’s not intellectual I can’t say it’s in the least sensual. I don’t think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England.’ When once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should spend a few weeks in London and perhaps in other parts of the celebrated island on their way to the Continent, they of course exchanged a good many allusions to their English acquaintance.

‘It will certainly be much nicer having friends there,’ was a remark that had one day dropped from Bessie while she sat on the sunny deck of the steamer, at her sister’s feet, from under which spread conveniently a large soft rug.

‘Whom do you mean by friends?’ Mrs Westgate had then invited the girl to say.

‘All those English gentlemen you’ve known and entertained. Captain Littledale, for instance.

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