The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path Of Duty, by Henry James

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Title: The Path Of Duty

Author: Henry James

Release Date: June 8, 2007 [EBook #21772]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATH OF DUTY ***

Produced by David Widger

THE PATH OF DUTY.

By Henry James

1885

I am glad I said to you the other night at Doubleton, inquiring--too
inquiring--compatriot, that I wouldn't undertake to tell you the story
(about Ambrose Tester), but would write it out for you; inasmuch as,
thinking it over since I came back to town, I see that it may really be
made interesting. It _is_ a story, with a regular development, and for
telling it I have the advantage that I happened to know about it
from the first, and was more or less in the confidence of every one
concerned. Then it will amuse me to write it, and I shall do so as
carefully and as cleverly as possible The first winter days in London
are not madly gay, so that I have plenty of time; and if the fog is
brown outside, the fire is red within. I like the quiet of this season;
the glowing chimney-corner, in the midst of the December mirk, makes me
think, as I sit by it, of all sorts of things. The idea that is almost
always uppermost is the bigness and strangeness of this London world.
Long as I have lived here,--the sixteenth anniversary of my marriage is
only ten days off,--there is still a kind of novelty and excitement in
it It is a great pull, as they say here, to have remained sensitive,--to
have kept one's own point of view. I mean it's more entertaining,--it
makes you see a thousand things (not that they are all very charming).
But the pleasure of observation does not in the least depend on the
beauty of what one observes. You see innumerable little dramas; in fact,
almost everything has acts and scenes, like a comedy. Very often it is a
comedy with tears. There have been a good many of them, I am afraid,
in the case I am speaking of. It is because this history of Sir Ambrose
Tester and Lady Vandeleur struck me, when you asked me about the
relations of the parties, as having that kind of progression, that when
I was on the point o