Ghost Stories of Henry James (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Henry James

The spring day was warm to his young blood, and he had a book in his pocket which, when he had passed into the Gardens and, after a short stroll, dropped into a chair, he took out with the slow soft sigh that finally ushers in a pleasure postponed.

She was in the room before you knew it?’ ‘I looked up from my letter-writing – at that table under the lamp I had been wholly absorbed in it – and she stood before me.’ ‘Then what did you do?’ ‘I sprang up with an ejaculation,

Phrasing

‘What was the lady who was here before?’ ‘The last governess? She was also young and pretty – almost as young and almost as pretty, miss, even as you.’ ‘Ah, then I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!’ I recollect throwing off. ‘He seems to like us young and pretty!’ ‘Oh, he did,’ Mrs Grose assented; ‘It was the way he liked everyone!’ She had no sooner spoken, indeed, than she caught herself up. ‘I mean that’s his way – the master’s.’ I was struck. ‘But of whom did you speak first?’ She looked blank, but she coloured. ‘Why, of him.’ ‘Of the master?’ ‘Of who else?’ There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant;

If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures – if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden.

How is this one sentence.