The Turn of the Screw

"It was as if, while I took in—what I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness."

"It was as if, while I took in—what I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness."

"It was as if, while I took in all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame. That was how I thought, with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and that he was not."

“Then you do know what she died of?” I asked.
“No—I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn’t; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!”
“Yet you had, then, your idea—”
“Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes—as to that. She couldn’t have stayed. Fancy it here—for a governess! And afterward I imagined—and I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.”

"Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He’s not reading to her,” I declared; “they’re talking of THEM— they’re talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonder I’m not."

"Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I didn’t in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush."

"I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake at his ease. “Well, what are YOU up to?” he asked with a grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grouse, had she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was ‘out’.
I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I was there?”
“Why, of course, I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You’re like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed.
“Then you weren’t asleep?”
“Not much! I lie awake and think.”
I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. “What is it,” I asked, “that you think of?”
“What in the world, my dear, but YOU?”

“Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, and I’d rather die than give you pain or do you wrong—I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles” —oh, I brought it out even if I should go too far.”

I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama and the catastrophe was precipitated. "Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the world, please, am I going back to school?"

Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses.