Sublime

Henry James

A sensitive woman, disappointed in marriage, exhausts her own ingenuity before she takes counsel.

Henry James’s notebooks,

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.

It very soon came to be predicted that he would marry again, and there were at least a dozen young women of whom one may say that it was by no fault of theirs that, for six months after his return, the prediction did not come true.

But he seemed to me to have either a strange reserve or a strange simplicity; to be fundamentally unfurnished with ‘ideas’. He had no beliefs nor hopes nor fears, – nothing but senses, appetites, and serenely luxurious tastes. As I watched him strolling about looking at his finger-nails, I often wondered whether he had anything that could properly