The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

“Do you mean of dislike?” “God help us, no. Of something much worse.” “Worse than dislike?—this left her indeed at a loss. “With a determination—indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention.”

I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch.

but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth.

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.