The Finer Grain

The Finer Grain, by Henry
James

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Title: The Finer Grain
Author: Henry James
Release Date: June 29, 2007 [EBook #21968]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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GRAIN ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FINER GRAIN
By Henry James
1910

CONTENTS
The Velvet Glove
Mora Montravers
A Round of Visits
Crapy Cornelia
The Bench of Desolation

"THE VELVET GLOVE"

I
HE thought he had already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fulness
the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him
than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude,
quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new literary
star that had begun to hang, with a fresh red light, over the vast, even
though rather confused, Anglo-Saxon horizon; positively approaching
that celebrity with a shy and artless appeal. The young Lord invoked on
this occasion the celebrity's prized judgment of a special literary case;
and Berridge could take the whole manner of it for one of the
"quaintest" little acts displayed to his amused eyes, up to now, on the
stage of European society--albeit these eyes were quite aware, in
general, of missing everywhere no more of the human scene than
possible, and of having of late been particularly awake to the large
extensions of it spread before him (since so he could but fondly read
his fate) under the omen of his prodigious "hit." It was because of his
hit that he was having rare opportunities--of which he was so honestly
and humbly proposing, as he would have said, to make the most: it was
because every one in the world (so far had the thing gone) was reading

"The Heart of Gold" as just a slightly too fat volume, or sitting out the
same as just a fifth-act too long play, that he found himself floated on a
tide he would scarce have dared to show his favourite hero sustained by,
found a hundred agreeable and interesting things happen to him which
were all, one way or another, affluents of the golden stream.
The great renewed resonance--renewed by the incredible luck of the
play--was always in his ears without so much as a conscious turn of his
head to listen; so that the queer world of his fame was not the mere
usual field of the Anglo-Saxon boom, but positively the bottom of the
whole theatric sea, unplumbed source of the wave that had borne him in
the course of a year or two over German, French, Italian, Russian,
Scandinavian foot-lights. Paris itself really appeared for the hour the
centre of his cyclone, with reports and "returns," to say nothing of
agents and emissaries, converging from the minor capitals; though his
impatience was scarce the less keen to get back to London, where his
work had had no such critical excoriation to survive, no such lesson of
anguish to learn, as it had received at the hand of supreme authority, of
that French authority which was in such a matter the only one to be
artistically reckoned with. If his spirit indeed had had to reckon with it
his fourth act practically hadn't: it continued to make him blush every
night for the public more even than the inimitable feuilleton had made
him blush for himself.
This had figured, however, after all, the one bad drop in his cup; so that,
for the rest, his high-water mark might well have been, that evening at
Gloriani's studio, the approach of his odd and charming applicant,
vaguely introduced at the latter's very own request by their hostess,
who, with an honest, helpless, genial gesture, washed her fat
begemmed hands of the name and identity of either, but left the fresh,
fair, ever so habitually assured, yet ever so easily awkward Englishman
with his plea to put forth. There was that in this pleasant personage
which could still make Berridge wonder what conception of profit from
him might have, all incalculably, taken form in such a head--these
being truly the last intrenchments of our hero's modesty. He wondered,
the splendid young man, he wondered awfully, he wondered (it was
unmistakable) quite nervously, he wondered, to John's ardent and acute

imagination, quite beautifully, if the author of "The Heart of Gold"
would mind just looking at a book by a friend of his, a great friend,
which he himself believed rather clever, and had in fact