The Aspern Papers

by Henry James

She became too bizarre, too actually resurgent. Then got here a take a look at, with the notion that we were now not definitely head to head, inasmuch as she had over her eyes a horrible inexperienced coloration which, for her, served almost as a masks. I believed for the immediate that she had positioned it on expressly, simply so from beneath it she may also scrutinize me without being scrutinized herself. At the identical time it expanded the presumption that there has been a ghastly loss of life’s-head lurking in the back of it. The divine Juliana as a grinning skull—the vision hung there till it handed. Then it got here to me that she WAS especially old—so vintage that dying may also take her at any 2d, before I had time to get what I desired from her. The subsequent perception was a correction to that; it lighted up the scenario. She may want to die next week, she might die the following day—then I may want to seize her papers. Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speakme. She modified into very small and shrunken, bent ahead, together along with her hands in her lap. She became carrying black, and her head was wrapped in a piece of old black lace which confirmed no hair. My emotion preserving me silent she spoke first, and the remark she made become precisely the maximum sudden.