The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

I became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm.

how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. 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.

Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character?

Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding.

He remained there awhile, with his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the dull things of November.

at those moments of torment that I have described as the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the worst.

The frames and squares of the great window were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or shut out.

then at last he put into two words—"Do YOU?"—more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.

if we're alone together now it's you that are alone most.

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it.

he said with the brightest superficial eagerness,

He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain.

a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness?

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his back to the window.

The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul,

that I drank like a waft of fragrance.

Miles's own face, in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage of uneasiness.

he knew that he was in presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know.

wonder if it were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world.

But I was infatuated—I was blind with victory,

For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation.