The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes by Henry James, 1868
The magic trick:
Slow tension build
We’ve got a Henry James ghost story for you to cap this week of haunted tales on SSMT.
This one is a slow burn. In fact, I would argue it’s not all that scary for about 95 percent of the text. James is far more interested in diving into human psychology here than supernatural scares. So we get a lot of slowly plotted developments around two sisters and their relationship as they both compete for the affections of the same man. Oddly, the reader does a lot of heavy lifting here. Because the pace is so slow, the reader’s anticipation for something major to break only builds. And because the microscope is applied to the sisters’ competing feelings so closely, we intuit that the major dam break we’re expecting from the plot will be something awful to do with them.
It’s tense.
And that’s quite a trick on James’s part.
The selection:
That they were both very nice girls Arthur Lloyd was not
slow to discover; but it took him some time to satisfy himself as to the balance of their charms. He had a strong presentiment-an emotion of a nature entirely too cheerful to be called a foreboding-that he was destined to marry one of them; yet he was unable to arrive at a preference, and for such a consummation a preference was certainly indispensable, inasmuch as Lloyd was quite too much of a young man to reconcile himself to the idea of making a choice by lot and being cheated of the heavenly delight of falling in love. He resolved to take things easily, and to let his heart speak. Meanwhile, he was on a very pleasant footing. Mrs. Willoughby showed a dignified indifference to his “intentions,” equally remote from a carelessness of her daughters’ honor and from that hideous alacrity to make him commit himself, which, in his quality of a young man of property, he had but too often encountered in the venerable dames of his native islands. As for Bernard, all that he asked was that his friend should take his sisters as his own; and as for the fair creatures themselves, however each may have secretly longed for the monopoly of Mr. Lloyd’s attentions, they observed a very decent and modest and contented demeanor.
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