The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.

Dear oh dear.

If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children —?”

He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated: “YOU will.”

“Well, if I don’t know who she was in love with, I know who HE was.”

cropped up in another place.

Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.

Come again?

They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory;

Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder.

David playing to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion.

My acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly,

Hmm

There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL.

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair