The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Finer Grain, by Henry James

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Title: The Finer Grain

Author: Henry James

Release Date: June 29, 2007 [EBook #21968]
File last updated on December 12, 2007

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FINER GRAIN ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FINER GRAIN

By Henry James

1910

[Transcriber's Note: After posting it was discovered that there were several
missing pages from the section titled "Mora Montravers". This section has been
removed and will be replaced as soon as possible.]

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 t