The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl

Volumes I and II, Complete

By Henry James

BOOK FIRST: THE PRINCE

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was

one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image

of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.

Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he

recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the

real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he

said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the

sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a

fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either

of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all

sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided

his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his

imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and

then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in

silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or

in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as

tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been

the loot of far-off victories. The young man’s movements, however,

betrayed no consistency of attention—not even, for that matter, when

one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded,

as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more

delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at

perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince’s undirected

thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of

the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the

possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the

notes of the scene. He was too restless—that was the fact—for any

concentration, and the last idea that would just now have occurred to

him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.

He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before, and

what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the sense of how

he had been justified. Capture had crowned the pursuit—or success,

as he would otherwise have put it, had rewarded virtue; whereby the

consciousness of these things made him, for the hour, rather serious

than gay. A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his

handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time

oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark

blue eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply

“foreign” to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be

observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a “refined”

Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at three o’clock,

his fate had practically been sealed, and that even when one pretended

to no quarrel with it the moment had something of the grimness of a

crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made. There was nothing

to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our personage

felt it while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were

married, so definitely had the solicitors, at three o’clock, enabled the

date to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He was

to dine at half-past eight o’clock with the young lady on whose behalf,

and on whose father’s, the London lawyers had reached an inspired

harmony with his own man of business, poor Calderoni, fresh from Rome

and now apparently in the wondrous situation of being “shown London,”