Glasses | Page 3

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Glasses
by Henry James
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.

In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found myself
grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had been struck
by the beauty of a face that approached us and I was still more affected
when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a window
thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it an brightly as a drapery
dropped from a sill--a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young lady
flanked by two young men, a wonderful