The Sense of the Past

by Henry James

"I grant you, cousin," Perry interposed, "that there has gone on here for months past such a sight of writing and reading as would have done credit to a lawyer's office. I congratulate you and congratulate them on what it seems to have meant." He had spoken in franker accommodation than had yet come from him, and now walked away to the window, where, looking out, he drew a deep breath again; Ralph remaining struck with his odd alternations, those, as who should say, of a man who could lose his ease and fail of his balance and then once more recover them—which was in fact very much what was happening to our friend himself.

"I suppose you've kept my letters, every one of which I remember, as I've kept yours," Molly resumed in her great gaiety—"so that I can bring them down to you tied up with pink ribbons, and then, if we compare, we'll see who wrote oftenest; though of course I quite allow," she smiled, "who wrote best."

Ralph met afresh on this one of his needs to consider. "You have 'em tied up with pink ribbon?"

"You mean," Molly asked "that you've tied up mine with blue? Or that you've tied up mother's with black?"

He was conscious, once more, that the truth of this would come to him—but meanwhile, just for the instant, he wondered and waited. "You've really got mine to show me?"

"In return for your showing me mine; which—look at him, look at him!" she said to her mother—"I don't half believe you've kept."

He was obliged to hang fire but a moment longer—it was like that question of her portrait in his pocket. He hadn't been sure of that, but the miniature was nevertheless there. Her letters weren't secreted about his person of course, but where would they be else than at the bottom of that box at his inn? "If you can prove one of them missing," he was thus in twenty seconds ready to answer, "I'll chew the rest of 'em up and swallow 'em, red tape and all."

"Have you tied mine with red tape?" Mrs. Midmore asked in full amusement.

The pleasure of being certain when he could be certain was, he rejoiced to note, as great to him as ever. "We don't deal in that article as much in America, no doubt, as you do here, but one always takes it, you know, for binding—and if I'm bound with pink ribbon," he said to Molly, "I'll have you understand that you're tied, my dear, as the lawyers tie up deeds and contracts. So that's the way," he laughed, "I hold you to your bargain." With which indeed, however, he had but to hear the elder lady enrich the air with her assurance that their bargain was the best witnessed as well as the fairest she had ever had to do with, in order to feel anew that pinch of conscience, as he could only have called it, which he had a few minutes before too insufficiently soothed. He might really have been telling lies within these later instants—by the measure, that is, of his recurrent wish to establish his innocence of the other recognition. His need in this connection withal was to be clearest to Mrs. Midmore. "Ten times on the voyage did I read them all over, and in fact if she dares to doubt of it I'll repeat every word of 'em before you and her brother—which is a threat, my love, that I think will keep you quiet," he gaily continued to the girl herself. And he had on it an extraordinary further inspiration—so far as one such was more extraordinary than another, and so far as what was now before him, for instance, was more so than that quick vividness, just recorded, of his sense, his positive exact vision, of the red-taped packets in the portmanteau. "I have them by heart with the funny spelling and all; and if our company only hear, without seeing, your sweetest passages, my dear, they won't know, they won't know——!"

"That I did once write 'affection' with one 'f', you mean?" Molly broke in with so little resentment as to convert into light banter on his part a stretch of allusion which he had risked with a slight fear of excess. "You'll find also when you look again that I once spelled 'frightful' ite—I remembered it after my letter had gone. And I remember something else too—which, however, I'll not confess to before them."