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- Herausgeber: Streetlib Book Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Glasses is short story by Henry James. A young woman whose only asset is a supremely beautiful face is about to make a society marriage until her fiance discovers that, being virtually blind, she needs thick glasses which ruin her looks. The anonymous narrator, a bachelor artist, visits Folkestone and sees a young woman with an astonishly beautiful face. From a friend, the widowed Mrs Meldrum who has to wear disfiguring glasses, he learns that she is Flora Saunt, an orphan. She has an admirer in Lord Iffield, heir to a country estate but not very bright. Another admirer, also well off, is Geoffrey Dawling, who is intelligent and sympathetic but not good looking. Flora agrees to sit for a portrait by the narrator, who discovers that, having little money or brain, her only goal in life is to acquire a husband. After she succeeds in getting engaged to Iffield, the narrator sees the two in a London shop where, to inspect an item, she surreptitiously uses a pince-nez. Momentarily, the beauty of her face is ruined. Revisiting Folkestone later, in the distance he sees a woman in corrective glasses who he takes to be Mrs Meldrum. In fact, to the embarrassment of both, it is Flora. Dropped by Iffield when he realised her sight was failing, she has been given a home by the kindly Mrs Meldrum. Some time later in London, the narrator attends a performance of Lohengrin. In a box, he sees a beautiful woman wearing expensive jewels who he thinks must be Flora. She points her opera glasses at him and smiles. Going up to her box and kissing her hand in greeting, he realises she is now blind. Geoffrey, her loving husband whose lack of looks she cannot see, rejoins the two.
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Table of contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
By
Henry James
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER I
Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the thread and let it lead me back to the first impression. The little story is all there, I can touch it from point to point; for the thread, as I call it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None of the beads are missing—at least I think they’re not: that’s exactly what I shall amuse myself with finding out.
I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down to Folkestone for a blow. Art was long, I felt, and my holiday short; my mother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visit when I could. I remember how on this occasion, after weeks in my stuffy studio with my nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air and cooled my eyes with the purple sea. The place was full of lodgings, and the lodgings were at that season full of people, people who had nothing to do but to stare at one another on the great flat down. There were thousands of little chairs and almost as many little Jews; and there was music in an open rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We all strolled to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level cliff-top, edged in places with its iron rail, might have been the deck of a huge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bath chairs, and there was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of which I always walked. There was in fine weather the coast of France to look at, and there were the usual things to say about it; there was also in every state of the atmosphere our friend Mrs. Meldrum, a subject of remark not less inveterate. The widow of an officer in the Engineers, she had settled, like many members of the martial miscellany, well within sight of the hereditary enemy, who however had left her leisure to form in spite of the difference of their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it high aloft with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such diameter and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her as flattering her nose against the glass of her spectacles. She was extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blest conveniences they were, in their hideous, honest strength—they showed the good lady everything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhanced by wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn resistances of cut, wondrous encounters in which the art of the toilet seemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the voice of an angel.
