The Aspern Papers: (with Biographical Introduction)

by Henry James

It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career.

I was seldom at home in the evening, for when I attempted to occupy myself in my apartments the lamplight brought in a swarm of noxious insects, and it was too hot for closed windows.

My interlocutress appeared incapable of grasping more than one clause in any proposition,

But the people came all the same; if the Venetians liked you once they liked you forever.

She had not thanked me while the flowers continued to come, but she departed from her custom so far as to send for me as soon as she began to fear that they would not come any more.

She had forgotten what an attractive thing the world is, and it was coming over her that somehow she had for the best years of her life been cheated of it.

"And did she show you that? Oh, gracious—oh, deary me!" groaned Miss Tita, who appeared to feel that the situation was passing out of her control and that the elements of her fate were thickening around her.

The room was a dire confusion; it looked like the room of an old actress. There were clothes hanging over chairs, odd-looking shabby bundles here and there, and various pasteboard boxes piled together, battered, bulging, and discolored, which might have been fifty years old.

At last I took my way home again, slowly getting all but inextricably lost, as I did whenever I went out in Venice: so that it was considerably past midnight when I reached my door.

had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Miss Bordereau in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours afterward that it was highly probable I had killed her.

rankled in my mind that I had been called a publishing scoundrel, for certainly I did publish and certainly I had not been very delicate.

"She's dead!" I exclaimed, giving him a very different look. "So it appears, since they have buried her."

His conception of funerals was apparently that they were mainly to amuse the living.

Miss Tita had none of the pride that makes a person wish to preserve the look of independence; she did not in the least pretend that she knew at present what would become of her.

It was a comfort to me a long time afterward to consider that she could not have seen in me the smallest symptom of disrespect.

Did she think I had made love to her, even to get the papers? I had not, I had not; I repeated that over to myself for an hour, for two hours, till I was wearied if not convinced.

had been as kind as possible, because I really liked her; but since when had that become a crime where a woman of such an age and such an appearance was concerned?

I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman.