헨리 제임스의 사생활.The Book of The Private Life, by Henry James
THE PRIVATE LIFE
We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval glacier. The
hour and the scene were one of those impressions which make up a little, in
Switzerland, for the modern indignity of travel―the promiscuities and vulgarities,
the station and the hotel, the gregarious patience, the struggle for a scrappy
attention, the reduction to a numbered state. The high valley was pink with the
mountain rose, the cool air as fresh as if the world were young. There was a faint
flush of afternoon on undiminished snows, and the fraternizing tinkle of the
unseen cattle came to us with a cropped and sun- warmed odour. The balconied
inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in the Oberland, and for a week
we had had company and weather. This was felt to be great luck, for one would
have made up for the other had either been bad.
The weather certainly would have made up for the company; but it was not
subjected to this tax, for we had by a happy chance the fleur des pois: Lord and
Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, the greatest (in the opinion of many) of our literary
glories, and Blanche Adney, the greatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical.