The Beldonald Holbein

Name: The Beldonald Holbein
Author: Henry James

by Henry James

Pages: about 30
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 33 min at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 18 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Transcribed from the 1922 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk. Proofing by Andy and his wife.
Mrs. Munden had not yet been to my studio on so good a pretext as when she first intimated that it would be quite open to me--should I only care, as she called it, to throw the handkerchief--to paint her beautiful sister-in-law. I needn't go here more than is essential into the question of Mrs. Munden, who would really, by the way, be a story in herself. She has a manner of her own of putting things, and some of those she has put to me--! Her implication was that Lady Beldonald hadn't only seen and admired certain examples of my work, but had literally been prepossessed in favour of the painter's "personality." Had I been struck with this sketch I might easily have imagined her ladyship was throwing me the handkerchief. "She hasn't done," my visitor said, "what she ought."
"Nothing horrid--ah dear no." And something in Mrs. Munden's tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment, even suggested to me that what she "oughtn't" was perhaps what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected. "She hasn't got on."
"But I thought that was the way of ways to get on."
"It's one of them. But it's one of the ways of being awfully out of it too. There are so many!"
"Yes, plenty of them," Mrs. Munden sighed. "So many ways, I mean, of being one."
"Well," my friend returned as if it were rather difficult to express, "she hasn't done with it--"
Mrs. Munden in a manner corrected me, but it was difficult to express. "My brother at all events was certainly selfish.

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The Beldonald Holbein

From the opening

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