Henry James

The Ivory Tower Henry James

It was but a question of leaving their own contracted "grounds," of crossing the Avenue and proceeding then to Mr. Betterman's gate, which even with the deliberate step of a truly massive young person she could reach in three or four minutes. So, making no other preparation than to open a vast pale-green parasol, a portable pavilion from which there fluttered fringes, frills and ribbons that made it resemble the roof of some Burmese palanquin or perhaps even pagoda, she took her way while these accessories fluttered in the August air, the morning freshness, and the soft sea-light. Her other draperies, white and voluminous, yielded to the mild breeze in the manner of those of a ship held back from speed yet with its canvas expanded; they conformed to their usual law of suggestion that the large loose ponderous girl, mistress as she might have been of the most expensive modern aids to the constitution of a "figure," lived, as they said about her, in wrappers and tea-gowns; so that, save for her enjoying obviously the rudest health, she might have been a convalescent creeping forth from the consciousness of stale bedclothes. She turned in at the short drive, making the firm neat gravel creak under her tread, and at the end of fifty yards paused before the florid villa, a structure smothered in senseless architectural ornament, as if to put her question to its big fair foolish face. How Mr. Betterman might be this morning, and what sort of a night he might have had, was what she wanted to learn-an anxiety very real with her and which, should she be challenged, would nominally and decently have brought her; but her finer interest was in the possibility that Graham Fielder might have come.