DOI Artikel:
James, Henry: The Coxon Fund
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21215#0340
336 The Coxon Fund
the first. I began to ask myself how people who suited each
other so little could please each other so much. The charm was
some material charm, some affinity exquisite doubtless, but super-
ficial ; some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force
and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They
might dote on each other's persons, but how could they know each
other's souls ? How could they have the same prejudices, how
could they have the same horizon ? Such questions, I confess,
seemed quenched but not answered when, one day in February,
going out to Wimbledon, I found my young lady in the house.
A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was
as much of a passion as was necessary. No impulse equally strong
indeed had drawn George Gravener to America ; a circumstance
on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind
myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was
distinctly different, and I feit that the difference was not simply
that of her being in mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon
enough what it was : it was the difference between a handsome
girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four
hundred a year. This explanation indeed didn't wholly content
me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double
cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether,
buried under the ruins of his fortune and leavingnext to nothing,
had died a few weeks before.
" So she has come out to marry George Gravener ? " I de-
manded. " Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved
her the trouble ?"
" Hasn't the House just met ? *' said Adelaide. Then she
added : " I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the
marriage is a little shaky. If it were certain, so self-respecting a
girl as Ruth would have waited for him over there."
I noted
the first. I began to ask myself how people who suited each
other so little could please each other so much. The charm was
some material charm, some affinity exquisite doubtless, but super-
ficial ; some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force
and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They
might dote on each other's persons, but how could they know each
other's souls ? How could they have the same prejudices, how
could they have the same horizon ? Such questions, I confess,
seemed quenched but not answered when, one day in February,
going out to Wimbledon, I found my young lady in the house.
A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was
as much of a passion as was necessary. No impulse equally strong
indeed had drawn George Gravener to America ; a circumstance
on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind
myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was
distinctly different, and I feit that the difference was not simply
that of her being in mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon
enough what it was : it was the difference between a handsome
girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four
hundred a year. This explanation indeed didn't wholly content
me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double
cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether,
buried under the ruins of his fortune and leavingnext to nothing,
had died a few weeks before.
" So she has come out to marry George Gravener ? " I de-
manded. " Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved
her the trouble ?"
" Hasn't the House just met ? *' said Adelaide. Then she
added : " I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the
marriage is a little shaky. If it were certain, so self-respecting a
girl as Ruth would have waited for him over there."
I noted