It was in any case over MY life,
MY past, and MY friends alone that we could take anything
like our ease--a state of affairs that led them sometimes without
the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders.
I was invited--with no visible connection--to repeat afresh
Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to confirm the details
already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite
different ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken,
my predicament, as I have called it, grew most sensible.
The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought,
it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves.
Since the light brush, that second night on the upper landing,
of the presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I had seen nothing,
whether in or out of the house, that one had better not have seen.
There was many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint,
and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way, would have favored
the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned, the summer had gone;
the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights.
The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces
and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--
all strewn with crumpled playbills.
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