|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: aims she would suspect me less if I should be businesslike,
and yet I consented not to be so. It was possible she intended
her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony, to show
how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her.
On that hypothesis it was well to let her see that one did
not notice her little tricks. The real reading of the matter,
I afterward perceived, was simply the poor old woman's desire
to emphasize the fact that I was in the enjoyment of a favor
as rigidly limited as it had been liberally bestowed.
She had given me part of her house, and now she would
not give me even a morsel of paper with her name on it.
|
