The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Golden Bowl, by Henry James

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Title: The Golden Bowl

Author: Henry James

Release Date: July, 2003 [Etext# 4264]
Posting Date: December 24, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN BOWL ***

Produced by Eve Sobol

THE GOLDEN BOWL

Volumes I and II, Complete

By Henry James

1904

BOOK FIRST: THE PRINCE

PART FIRST

I

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was
one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image
of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.
Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he
recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the
real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he
said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the
sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a
fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either
of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all
sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided
his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his
imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and
then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in
silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or
in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as
tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been
the loot of far-off victories. The young man's movements, however,
betrayed no consistency of attention--not even, for that matter, when
one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded,
as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more
delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at
perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince's undirected
thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of
the season had come and the