THE JOLLY CORNER
by Henry James


CHAPTER I


"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon;
"and I make answer as I can--begging or dodging the question, putting
them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really,"
he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver
way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be
almost altogether about something that concerns only myself." He was
talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had
availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and
this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact
presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the
considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so
strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise;
and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently
neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for
play. He had given them more than thirty years--thirty-three, to be
exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance
quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving
New York--he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he
had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which
case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would
have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to
Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted
mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the