Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and my servant, who is a wonderfully handy fellow" (this personage was an evocation of the moment), "can easily cook me a chop there.
My tastes and habits are of the simplest; I live on flowers!"And then I ventured to add that if they were very poor it was all the more reason they should let their rooms.
They were bad economists--I had never heard of such a waste of material.
I saw in a moment that the good lady had never before been spoken to in that way, with a kind of humorous firmness which did not exclude sympathy but was on the contrary founded on it.
She might easily have told me that my sympathy was impertinent, but this by good fortune did not occur to her.
I left her with the understanding that she would consider the matter with her aunt and that I might come back the next day for their decision.
"The aunt will refuse; she will think the whole proceeding very louche!"Mrs.Prest declared shortly after this, when I had resumed my place in her gondola.She had put the idea into my head and now (so little are women to be counted on) she appeared to take a despondent view of it.
Her pessimism provoked me and I pretended to have the best hopes; I went so far as to say that I had a distinct presentiment that I should succeed.
Upon this Mrs.Prest broke out, "Oh, I see what's in your head!
You fancy you have made such an impression in a quarter of an hour that she is dying for you to come and can be depended upon to bring the old one round.
If you do get in you'll count it as a triumph."I did count it as a triumph, but only for the editor (in the last analysis), not for the man, who had not the tradition of personal conquest.When I went back on the morrow the little maidservant conducted me straight through the long sala (it opened there as before in perfect perspective and was lighter now, which I thought a good omen) into the apartment from which the recipient of my former visit had emerged on that occasion.
It was a large shabby parlor, with a fine old painted ceiling and a strange figure sitting alone at one of the windows.
They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive feelings that accompanied my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics.
I grew used to her afterward, though never completely;but as she sat there before me my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit.
Her presence seemed somehow to contain his, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than I ever had been before or ever have been since.Yes, I remember my emotions in their order, even including a curious little tremor that took me when I saw that the niece was not there.
With her, the day before, I had become sufficiently familiar, but it almost exceeded my courage (much s I had longed for the event)to be left alone with such a terrible relic as the aunt.
She was too strange, too literally resurgent.Then came a check, with the perception that we were not really face to face, inasmuch as she had over her eyes a horrible green shade which, for her, served almost as a mask.I believed for the instant that she had put it on expressly, so that from underneath it she might scrutinize me without being scrutinized herself.
At the same time it increased the presumption that there was a ghastly death's-head lurking behind it.The divine Juliana as a grinning skull--the vision hung there until it passed.
Then it came to me that she WAS tremendously old--so old that death might take her at any moment, before I had time to get what I wanted from her.The next thought was a correction to that; it lighted up the situation.She would die next week, she would die tomorrow--then I could seize her papers.
Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speaking.She was very small and shrunken, bent forward, with her hands in her lap.
She was dressed in black, and her head was wrapped in a piece of old black lace which showed no hair.
My emotion keeping me silent she spoke first, and the remark she made was exactly the most unexpected.