214 results
7 - Understanding Phase Transitions via Mutual Information and MMSE
- Edited by Miguel R. D. Rodrigues, University College London, Yonina C. Eldar, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
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- Information-Theoretic Methods in Data Science
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- 22 March 2021
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- 08 April 2021, pp 197-228
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The ability to understand and solve high-dimensional inference problems is essential for modern data science. This chapter examines high-dimensional inference problems through the lens of information theory and focuses on the standard linear model as a canonical example that is both rich enough to be practically useful and simple enough to be studied rigorously. In particular, this model can exhibit phase transitions where an arbitrarily small change in the model parameters can induce large changes in the quality of estimates. For this model, the performance of optimal inference can be studied using the replica method from statistical physics but, until recently, it was not known whether the resulting formulas were actually correct. In this chapter, we present a tutorial description of the standard linear model and its connection to information theory. We also describe the replica prediction for this model and outline the authors’ recent proof that it is exact.
An ultra-wide bandwidth (704 to 4 032 MHz) receiver for the Parkes radio telescope
- George Hobbs, Richard N. Manchester, Alex Dunning, Andrew Jameson, Paul Roberts, Daniel George, J. A. Green, John Tuthill, Lawrence Toomey, Jane F. Kaczmarek, Stacy Mader, Malte Marquarding, Azeem Ahmed, Shaun W. Amy, Matthew Bailes, Ron Beresford, N. D. R. Bhat, Douglas C.-J. Bock, Michael Bourne, Mark Bowen, Michael Brothers, Andrew D. Cameron, Ettore Carretti, Nick Carter, Santy Castillo, Raji Chekkala, Wan Cheng, Yoon Chung, Daniel A. Craig, Shi Dai, Joanne Dawson, James Dempsey, Paul Doherty, Bin Dong, Philip Edwards, Tuohutinuer Ergesh, Xuyang Gao, JinLin Han, Douglas Hayman, Balthasar Indermuehle, Kanapathippillai Jeganathan, Simon Johnston, Henry Kanoniuk, Michael Kesteven, Michael Kramer, Mark Leach, Vince Mcintyre, Vanessa Moss, Stefan Osłowski, Chris Phillips, Nathan Pope, Brett Preisig, Daniel Price, Ken Reeves, Les Reilly, John Reynolds, Tim Robishaw, Peter Roush, Tim Ruckley, Elaine Sadler, John Sarkissian, Sean Severs, Ryan Shannon, Ken Smart, Malcolm Smith, Stephanie Smith, Charlotte Sobey, Lister Staveley-Smith, Anastasios Tzioumis, Willem van Straten, Nina Wang, Linqing Wen, Matthew Whiting
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- Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia / Volume 37 / 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 08 April 2020, e012
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We describe an ultra-wide-bandwidth, low-frequency receiver recently installed on the Parkes radio telescope. The receiver system provides continuous frequency coverage from 704 to 4032 MHz. For much of the band ( ${\sim}60\%$ ), the system temperature is approximately 22 K and the receiver system remains in a linear regime even in the presence of strong mobile phone transmissions. We discuss the scientific and technical aspects of the new receiver, including its astronomical objectives, as well as the feed, receiver, digitiser, and signal processor design. We describe the pipeline routines that form the archive-ready data products and how those data files can be accessed from the archives. The system performance is quantified, including the system noise and linearity, beam shape, antenna efficiency, polarisation calibration, and timing stability.
A Frostman-Type Lemma for Sets with Large Intersections, and an Application to Diophantine Approximation – CORRIGENDUM
- Tomas Persson, Henry W. J. Reeve
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- Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society / Volume 61 / Issue 4 / November 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 08 August 2018, p. 1101
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IV
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 334-340
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There would have been a wonder for us meanwhile in his continued use, as it were, of his happy formula—brought out to Cornelia Rasch within ten minutes, or perhaps only within twenty, of his having settled into the quite comfortable chair that, two days later, she indicated to him by her fireside. He had arrived at her address through the fortunate chance of his having noticed her card, as he went out, deposited, in the good old New York fashion, on one of the rococo tables of Mrs. Worthingham's hall. His eye had been caught by the pencilled indication that was to affect him, the next instant, as fairly placed there for his sake. This had really been his luck, for he shouldn't have liked to write to Mrs. Worthingham for guidance—that he felt, though too impatient just now to analyze the reluctance. There was nobody else he could have approached for a clue, and with this reflection he was already aware of how it testified to their rare little position, his and Cornelia’s—position as conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors together of a dead and buried society—that there would have been, in all the town, under such stress, not a member of their old circle left to turn to. Mrs. Worthingham had practically, even if accidentally, helped him to knowledge; the last nail in the coffin of the poor dear extinct past had been planted for him by his having thus to reach his antique contemporary through perforation of the newest newness. The note of this particular recognition was in fact the more prescribed to him that the ground of Cornelia's return to a scene swept so bare of the associational charm was certainly inconspicuous. What had she then come back for?—he had asked himself that; with the effect of deciding that it probably would have been, a little, to “look after” her remnant of property. Perhaps she had come to save what little might still remain of that shrivelled interest; perhaps she had been, by those who took care of it for her, further swindled and despoiled, so that she wished to get at the facts. Perhaps on the other hand—it was a more cheerful chance—her investments, decently administered, were making larger returns, so that the rigorous thrift of Bognor could be finally relaxed.
I
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 348-353
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She had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last dreadful conversation, when, for whatever was left him of pluck or confidence—confidence in what he would fain have called a little more aggressively the strength of his position—he had judged best not to take it up. But this time there was no question of not understanding, or of pretending he didn’t; the ugly, the awful words, ruthlessly formed by her lips, were like the fingers of a hand that she might have thrust into her pocket for extraction of the monstrous object that would serve best for—what should he call it?—a gage of battle.
“If I haven't a very different answer from you within the next three days I shall put the matter into the hands of my solicitor, whom it may interest you to know I’ve already seen. I shall bring an action for ‘breach’ against you, Herbert Dodd, as sure as my name's Kate Cookham.”
There it was, straight and strong—yet he felt he could say for himself, when once it had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest light of his own very reasons. There she was, in all the grossness of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn't wish to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality, all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out; had measured its odious, specious presentability; had taken, he might be sure, the very best advice obtainable at Properley, where there was always a first-rate promptitude of everything fourth-rate; it was disgustingly certain, in short, that she’d proceed. She was sharp and adroit, moreover—distinctly in certain ways a master-hand; how otherwise, with her so limited mere attractiveness, should she have entangled him? He couldn't shut his eyes to the very probable truth that if she should try it she’d pull it off.
III
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 358-363
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His creditor, at the hour it suited her, transferred her base of operations to town, to which impenetrable scene she had also herself retired; and his raising of the first Two Hundred, during five exasperated and miserable months, and then of another Seventy piece-meal, bleedingly, after long delays and under the epistolary whiplash cracked by the London solicitor in his wretched ear even to an effect of the very report of Miss Cookham's tongue—these melancholy efforts formed a scramble up an arduous steep where steps were planted and missed, and bared knees were excoriated, and clutches at wayside tufts succeeded and failed, on a system to which poor Nan could have intelligently entered only if she had been somehow less ladylike. She kept putting into his mouth the sick quaver of where he should find the rest, the always inextinguishable rest, long after he had in silent rage fallen away from any further payment at all—at first, he had but too blackly felt, for himself, to the still quite possible non-exclusion of some penetrating ray of “exposure.” He didn't care a tuppenny damn now, and in point of fact, after he had by hook and by crook succeeded in being able to unload to the tune of Two-Hundred-and-Seventy, and then simply returned the newest reminder of his outstanding obligation unopened, this latter belated but real sign of fight, the first he had risked, remarkably caused nothing at all to happen; nothing at least but his being moved to quite tragically rueful wonder as to whether exactly some such demonstration mightn't have served his turn at an earlier stage.
He could by this time at any rate measure his ruin—with three fantastic mortgages on his house, his shop, his stock, and a burden of interest to carry under which his business simply stretched itself inanimate, without strength for a protesting kick, without breath for an appealing groan.
Julia Bride
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp -
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Crapy Cornelia
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp -
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B - Extracts from Prefaces to the New York Edition
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 551-566
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Henry James's New York Edition Prefaces are collected in Volume XXXIII of The Complete Fiction of Henry James. The editor of that volume, Oliver Herford, has excerpted and prepared the texts for this Appendix, and has supplied essential annotations; more extensive notes can be found in The Prefaces.
‘The Birthplace’: NYE XVII, xi–xii
Volume XVII of the New York Edition contains ‘The Altar of the Dead’, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Birthplace’, ‘The Private Life’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘The Real Right Thing’, ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘Julia Bride’. In the Preface to this volume James considers the first three tales together, as dramatizing the experiences of characters he calls ‘poor sensitive gentlemen’: respectively, George Stransom, John Marcher and Morris Gedge.
If “The Birthplace” deals with another poor gentleman—of interest as being yet again too fine for his rough fate—here at least I can claim to have gone by book, here once more I lay my hand, for my warrant, on the clue of actuality. It was one of the cases in which I was to say at the first brush of the hint: “How can there possibly not be innumerable things in it?” “It” was the mentioned adventure of a good intelligent man rather recently appointed to the care of a great place of pilgrimage, a shrine sacred to the piety and curiosity of the whole English-speaking race, and haunted by other persons as well; who, coming to his office with infinite zest, had after a while desperately thrown it up—as a climax to his struggle, some time prolonged, with “the awful nonsense he found himself expected and paid, and thence quite obliged, to talk.” It was in these simple terms his predicament was named to me—not that I would have had a word more, not indeed that I hadn't at once to turn my back for very joy of the suppressed details: so unmistakeably, on the spot, was a splendid case all there, so complete, in fine, as it stood, was the appeal to fond fancy; an appeal the more direct, I may add, by reason, as happened, of an acquaintance, lately much confirmed, on my own part, with the particular temple of our poor gentleman's priesthood.
The Papers
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp -
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II
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 354-357
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Which was the way, of course, he talked to Nan Drury—as he had felt the immediate wild need to do; for he should perhaps be able to bear it all somehow or other with her—while they sat together, when time and freedom served, on one of the very last, the far westward, benches of the interminable sea-front. It wasn't every one who walked so far, especially at that flat season—the only ghost of a bustle now, save for the gregarious, the obstreperous haunters of the fluttering, far-shining Pier, being reserved for the sunny Parade of midwinter. It wasn't every one who cared for the sunsets (which you got awfully well from there and which were a particularly strong point of the lower, the more “sympathetic,” as Herbert Dodd liked to call it, Properley horizon) as he had always intensely cared, and as he had found Nan Drury care; to say nothing of his having also observed how little they directly spoke to Miss Cookham. He had taught this oppressive companion to notice them a bit, as he had taught her plenty of other things, but that was a different matter; for the reason that the “land's end” (stretching a point it carried off that name) had been, and had had to be, by their lack of more sequestered resorts and conveniences, the scene of so much of what she styled their wooing-time—or, to put it more properly, of the time during which she had made the straightest and most unabashed love to him: just as it could henceforth but render possible, under an equal rigour, that he should enjoy there periods of consolation from beautiful, gentle, tender-souled Nan, to whom he was now at last, after the wonderful way they had helped each other to behave, going to make love, absolutely unreserved and abandoned, absolutely reckless and romantic love, a refuge from poisonous reality, as hard as ever he might.
The league-long, paved, lighted, garden-plotted, seated and refuged Marina renounced its more or less celebrated attractions to break off short here; and an inward curve of the kindly westward shore almost made a wide-armed bay, with all the ugliness between town and country,
III
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 403-406
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Outside in the intensity of the cold—it was a jump from the Tropics to the Pole—he felt afresh the force of what he had just been saying; that if it weren't for the fact of Mrs. Ash's good letter of welcome, despatched, characteristically, as soon as she had, like the faithful sufferer in Fiftieth Street, observed his name, in a newspaper, on one of the hotel-lists, he should verily, for want of a connection and an abutment, have scarce dared to face the void and the chill together, but have sneaked back into the jungle and there tried to lose himself. He made, as it was, the opposite effort, resolute to walk, though hovering now and then at vague crossways, radiations of roads to nothing, or taking cold counsel of the long but still sketchy vista, as it struck him, of the northward Avenue, bright and bleak, fresh and harsh, rich and evident somehow, a perspective like a page of florid modern platitudes. He didn't quite know what he had expected for his return—not certainly serenades and deputations; but without Mrs. Ash his mail would have quite lacked geniality, and it was as if Phil Bloodgood had gone off not only with so large a slice of his small peculium, but with all the broken bits of the past, the loose ends of old relationships, that he had supposed he might pick up again. Well, perhaps he should still pick up a few—by the sweat of his brow; no motion of their own at least, he by this time judged, would send them fluttering into his hand.
Which reflections but quickened his forecast of this charm of the old Paris inveteracy renewed—the so-prized custom of nine years before, when he still believed in results from his fond frequentation of the Beaux Arts; that of walking over the river to the Rue de Marignan, precisely, every Sunday without exception, and sitting at her fireside, and often all offensively, no doubt, outstaying every one.
II
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 266-273
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What he had first felt, of course, was the rare coolness of it, the almost impudent absence of any tone of responsibility; which had begun by seeming to make the little painter-man's own case as “rum,” surely, as one could imagine it. He had gone, poor troubled Traffle, after the talk, straight to his own studio, or to the rather chill and vague, if scrupulously neat, pavilion at the garden-end, which he had put up eight years ago in the modest hope that it would increasingly inspire him; since it wasn't making preparations and invoking facilities that constituted swagger, but, much rather, behaving as if one's powers could boldly dispense with them. He was certain Jane would come to him there on hearing of him from the parlour-maid, to whom he had said a word in the hall. He wasn't afraid—no—of having to speak a little as he felt; but, though well aware of his wife's impatience, he wasn't keen, either, for any added intensity of effort to abound only in Mrs. Traffle's sense. He required space and margin, he required a few minutes’ time, to say to himself frankly that this dear dismal lady had no sense—none at least of their present wretched question—that was at all worth developing; since he of course couldn't possibly remark it to poor Jane. He had perhaps never remarked for his own private benefit so many strange things as between the moment of his letting himself again into the perpetually swept and garnished temple of his own perfunctory aesthetic rites, where everything was ready to his hand and only that weak tool hung up, and his glimpse of Jane, from the smaller window, as she came down the garden walk. Puddick's studio had been distinctly dirty, and Puddick himself, from head to foot, despite his fine pale little face and bright, direct, much more searching than shifting eyes, almost as spotty as the large morsel of rag with which he had so oddly begun to rub his fingers while standing there to receive Mora's nearest male relative; but the canvas on his easel, the thing that even in the thick of his other adventure was making so straight a push for the Academy, almost embarrassed that relative's eyes, not to say that relative's conscience, by the cleanness of its appeal.
II
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 323-328
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If he went in, however, with something of his more or less inevitable scowl, there were really, at the moment, two rather valid reasons for screened observation; the first of these being that the whole place seemed to reflect as never before the lustre of Mrs. Worthingham's own polished and prosperous little person—to smile, it struck him, with her smile, to twinkle not only with the gleam of her lovely teeth, but with that of all her rings and brooches and bangles and other gewgaws, to curl and spasmodically cluster as in emulation of her charming complicated yellow tresses, to surround the most animated of pink-and-white, of ruffled and ribboned, of frilled and festooned Dresden china shepherdesses with exactly the right system of rococo curves and convolutions and other flourishes, a perfect bower of painted and gilded and moulded conceits. The second ground of this immediate impression of scenic extravagance, almost as if the curtain rose for him to the first act of some small and expensively mounted comic opera, was that she hadn’t, after all, awaited him in fond singleness, but had again just a trifle inconsiderately exposed him to the drawback of having to reckon, for whatever design he might amiably entertain, with the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger. It was odd how, on the instant, the little lady engaged with her did affect him as comparatively black—very much as if that had absolutely, in such a medium, to be the graceless appearance of any item not positively of some fresh shade of a light colour or of some pretty pretension to a charming twist. Any witness of their meeting, his hostess should surely have felt, would have been a false note in the whole rosy glow; but what note so false as that of the dingy little presence that she might actually, by a refinement of her perhaps always too visible study of effect, have provided as a positive contrast or foil? whose name and intervention, moreover, she appeared to be no more moved to mention and account for than she might have been to “present”—whether as stretched at her feet or erect upon disciplined haunches—some shaggy old domesticated terrier or poodle.
III
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 329-333
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Forty minutes later he was taking his way back from the queer miscarriage of his adventure; taking it, with no conscious positive felicity, through the very spaces that had witnessed shortly before the considerable serenity of his assurance. He had said to himself then, or had as good as said it, that, since he might do perfectly as he liked, it couldn't fail for him that he must soon retrace those steps, humming, to all intents, the first bars of a wedding-march; so beautifully had it cleared up that he was “going to like” letting Mrs. Worthingham accept him. He was to have hummed no wedding-march, as it seemed to be turning out—he had none, up to now, to hum; and yet, extraordinarily, it wasn't in the least because she had refused him. Why then hadn't he liked as much as he had intended to like it putting the pleasant act, the act of not refusing him, in her power? Could it all have come from the awkward minute of his failure to decide sharply, on Cornelia's departure, whether or no he would attend her to the door? He hadn't decided at all—what the deuce had been in him?—but had danced to and fro in the room, thinking better of each impulse and then thinking worse. He had hesitated like an ass erect on absurd hind legs between two bundles of hay; the upshot of which must have been his giving the falsest impression. In what way that was to be for an instant considered had their common past committed him to crapy Cornelia? He repudiated with a whack on the gravel any ghost of an obligation.
What he could get rid of with scanter success, unfortunately, was the peculiar sharpness of his sense that, though mystified by his visible flurry—and yet not mystified enough for a sympathetic question either—his hostess had been, on the whole, even more frankly diverted: which was precisely an example of that newest, freshest, finest freedom in her, the air and the candour of assuming, not “heartlessly,” not viciously, not even very consciously, but with a bright pampered confidence which would probably end by affecting one's nerves as the most impertinent stroke in the world, that every blest thing coming up for her in any connection was somehow matter for her general recreation.
Fordham Castle
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 11 April 2021
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- 21 September 2017, pp 149-168
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Sharp little Madame Massin, who carried on the pleasant pension and who had her small hard eyes everywhere at once, came out to him on the terrace and held up a letter addressed in a manner that he recognised even from afar, held it up with a question in her smile, or a smile, rather a pointed one, in her question—he could scarce have said which. She was looking, while so occupied, at the German group engaged in the garden, near by, with aperitive beer and disputation—the noonday luncheon being now imminent; and the way in which she could show prompt lips while her observation searchingly ranged might have reminded him of the object placed by a spectator at the theatre in the seat he desires to keep during the entr’acte. Conscious of the cross-currents of international passion, she tried, so far as possible, not to mix her sheep and her goats. The view of the bluest end of the Lake of Geneva—she insisted in persuasive circulars that it was the bluest—had never, on her high-perched terrace, wanted for admirers, though thus early in the season, during the first days of May, they were not so numerous as she was apt to see them at midsummer. This precisely, Abel Taker could infer, was the reason of a remark she had made him before the claims of the letter had been settled. “I shall put you next the American lady—the one who arrived yesterday. I know you’ll be kind to her; she had to go to bed, as soon as she got here, with a sick-headache brought on by her journey. But she's better. Who isn't better as soon as they get here? She's coming down, and I’m sure she’d like to know you.”
Taker had now the letter in his hand—the letter intended for “Mr. C. P. Addard”; which was not the name inscribed in the two or three books he had left out in his room, any more than it matched the initials, “A. F. T.” attached to the few pieces of his modest total of luggage.
VIII
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 21 September 2017, pp 131-142
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If she kept to herself, from the morrow on, for three days, her adoption of that course was helped, as she thankfully felt, by the great other circumstance and the great public commotion under cover of which it so little mattered what became of private persons. It was not simply that she had her reasons, but she couldn't during this time have descended again to Fleet Street even had she wished, though she said to herself often enough that her behaviour was rank cowardice. She left her friend alone with what he had to face, since, as she found, she could in absence from him a little recover herself. In his presence, the night of the news, she knew she had gone to pieces, had yielded, all too vulgarly, to a weakness proscribed by her original view. Her original view had been that if poor Beadel, worked up, as she inveterately kept seeing him, should embrace the tragic remedy, Howard Bight wouldn't be able not to show as practically compromised. He wouldn't be able not to smell of the wretched man's blood, morally speaking, too strongly for condonations or complacencies. There were other things, truly, that, during their minutes on the Embankment, he had been able to do, but they constituted just the sinister subtlety to which it was well that she should not again, yet awhile, be exposed. They were of the order—from the safe summit of Maida Hill she could make it out—that had proved corrosive to the muddled mind of the Frankfort fugitive, deprived, in the midst of them, of any honest issue. Bight, of course, rare youth, had meant no harm; but what was precisely queerer, what,when you came to judge, less human, than to be formed for offence, for injury, by the mere inherent play of the spirit of observation, of criticism, by the inextinguishable flame, in fine, of the ironic passion? The ironic passion, in such a world as surrounded one, might assert itself as half the dignity, the decency, of life; yet, none the less, in cases where one had seen it prove gruesomely fatal (and not to one's self, which was nothing, but to others, even the stupid and the vulgar) one was plainly admonished to—well, stand off a little and think.
Bibliography
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 21 September 2017, pp cxvi-cxxiv
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VII
- Henry James
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- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
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- 21 September 2017, pp 417-422
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“Well, it's your own fault,” Mark replied to that, “if you make me take advantage of you.” Winch had withdrawn his hand, which was back, violently shaking keys or money, in his trousers pocket; and in this position he had abruptly a pause, a sensible absence, that might have represented either some odd drop of attention, some turn-off to another thought, or just simply the sudden act of listening. His guest had indeed himself— under suggestion—the impression of a sound. “Mayn't you perhaps—if you hear something—have a call?”
Mark had said it so lightly, however, that he was the more struck with his host's appearing to turn just paler; and, with it, the latter now was listening. “You hear something?”
“I thought you did.” Winch himself, on Mark's own pressure of the outside bell, had opened the door of the apartment—an indication then, it sufficiently appeared, that Sunday afternoons were servants’, or attendants’, or even trained nurses’ holidays. It had also marked the stage of his convalescence, and to that extent—after his first flush of surprise—had but smoothed Monteith's way. At present he barely gave further attention; detaching himself as under some odd cross-impulse, he had quitted the spot and then taken, in the wide room, a restless turn—only, however, to revert in a moment to his friend's just-uttered deprecation of the danger of boring him. “If I make you take advantage of me—that is blessedly talk to me—it's exactly what I want to do. Talk to me—talk to me!” He positively waved it on; pulling up again, however, in his own talk, to say with a certain urgency: “Hadn't you better sit down?”
Mark, who stayed before the fire, couldn't but excuse himself. “Thanks— I’m very well so. I think of things and I fidget.”
Winch stood a moment with his eyes on the ground. “Are you very sure?”
“Quite—I’m all right if you don't mind.”
“Then as you like!” With which, shaking to extravagance again his long legs, Newton had swung off—only with a movement that, now his back was turned, affected his visitor as the most whimsical of all the forms of his rather unnatural manner.
V
- Henry James
- Edited by N. H. Reeve, University of Wales, Swansea
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- Book:
- The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 September 2017, pp 409-411
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Within the apartment to which he had been admitted, moreover, the fine intelligence we have imputed to him was in the course of three minutes confirmed; since it took him no longer than that to say to himself, facing his old acquaintance, that he had never seen any one so improved. The place, which had the semblance of a high studio light as well as a general air of other profusions and amplitudes, might have put him off a little by its several rather glaringly false accents, those of contemporary domestic “art” striking a little wild. The scene was smaller, but the rich confused complexion of the Pocahontas, showing through Du Barry paint and patches, might have set the example—which had been followed with the costliest candour—so that, clearly, Winch was in these days rich, as most people in New York seemed rich; as, in spite of Bob's depredations, Florence Ash was, as even Mrs. Folliott was in spite of Phil Bloodgood’s, as even Phil Bloodgood himself must have been for reasons too obvious; as in fine every one had a secret for being, or for feeling, or for looking, every one at least but Mark Monteith.
These facts were as nothing, however, in presence of his quick and strong impression that his pale, nervous, smiling, clean-shaven host had undergone since their last meeting some extraordinary process of refinement. He had been ill, unmistakably, and the effects of a plunge into plain clean living, where any fineness had remained, were often startling, sometimes almost charming. But independently of this, and for a much longer time, some principle of intelligence, some art of life, would discernibly have worked in him. Remembered from college years and from those two or three luckless and faithless ones of the Law School as constitutionally common, as consistently and thereby doubtless even rather powerfully coarse, clever only for uncouth and questionable things, he yet presented himself now as if he had suddenly and mysteriously been educated. There was a charm in his wide, “drawn,” convalescent smile, in the way his fine fingers—had he anything like fine fingers of old?