THE PRIVATE LIFE
THE WHEEL OF TIME LORD BEAUPRÉ
THE VISITS COLLABORATION
OWEN WINGRAVE
BY
HENRY JAMES
LONDON
JAMES R. OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1893
CONTENTS
The Private Life
The Wheel of Time
Lord Beaupré
The Visits
Collaboration
Owen Wingrave
THE PRIVATE LIFE
We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primevalglacier. The hour and the scene were one of those impressions which makeup a little, in Switzerland, for the modern indignity of travel—thepromiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregariouspatience, the struggle for a scrappy attention, the reduction to anumbered state. The high valley was pink with the mountain rose, thecool air as fresh as if the world were young. There was a faint flush ofafternoon on undiminished snows, and the fraternizing tinkle of theunseen cattle came to us with a cropped and sun-warmed odour. Thebalconied inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in theOberland, and for a week we had had company and weather. This was feltto be great luck, for one would have made up for the other had eitherbeen bad.
The weather certainly would have made up for the company; but it was notsubjected to this tax, for we had by a happy chance the fleur despois: Lord and Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, the greatest (in theopinion of many) of our literary glories, and Blanche Adney, thegreatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical. I mention thesefirst, because they were just the people whom in London, at that time,people tried to "get." People endeavoured to "book" them six weeksahead, yet on this occasion we had come in for them, we had all come infor each other, without the least wire-pulling. A turn of the game hadpitched us together, the last of August, and we recognized our luck byremaining so, under protection of the barometer. When the golden dayswere over—that would come soon enough—we should wind downopposite sides of the pass and disappear over the crest of surroundingheights. We were of the same general communion, we participated in the samemiscellaneous publicity. We met, in London, with irregular frequency; wewere more or less governed by the laws and the language, the traditionsand the shibboleths of the same dense social state. I think all of us,even the ladies, "did" something, though we pretended we didn't when itwas mentioned. Such things are not mentioned indeed in London, but itwas our innocent pleasure to be different here. There had to be some wayto show the difference, inasmuch as we were under the impression thatthis was our annual holiday. We felt at any rate that the conditionswere more human than in London, or that at least we ourselves were. Wewere frank about this, we talked about it: it was what we were talkingabout as we looked at the flushing glacier, just as some one calledattention to the prolonged absence of Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney. Wewere seated on the terrace of the inn, where there were benches andlittle tables, and those of us who were most bent on proving that we hadreturned to nature were, in the queer Germanic fashion, having coffeebefore