Henry James

He did stand there!—but high up, be­yond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morn­ing, lit­tle Flora had con­ducted me.

He has red hair, very red, close-curl­ing, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good fea­tures and lit­tle, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eye­brows are, some­how, darker; they look par­tic­u­larly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—aw­fully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and ex­cept for his lit­tle whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of look­ing like an ac­tor.”

Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!

and the strangest if not the bright­est thread in the pen­sive em­broi­dery I just spoke of was the im­pres­sion I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was un­der some in­flu­ence op­er­at­ing in his small in­tel­lec­tual life as a tremen­dous in­cite­ment.

“It all lies in half a dozen words,” I said to her, “words that re­ally set­tle the mat­ter. ‘Think, you know, what I might do!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the ground what he ‘might’ do.

I could only get on at all by tak­ing “na­ture” into my con­fi­dence and my ac­count, by treat­ing my mon­strous or­deal as a push in a di­rec­tion un­usual, of course, and un­pleas­ant, but de­mand­ing, af­ter all, for a fair front, only an­other turn of the screw of or­di­nary hu­man virtue.

sleep­ing in the room with his mother and wak­ing her up in the ter­ror of it; wak­ing her not to dis­si­pate