Portraits of Ladies: The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

The ‘place’ is the upper room of Milly Theale’s Venetian palace, one of the ‘high florid rooms’ where

hard cool pavements took reflexions in their life-long polish, and where the sun on stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted ‘subjects’ in the splendid ceilings — medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scalloped and gilded about … (p. 341)

She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer blind, breathed its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was in it, as in the ark of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why shouldn’t this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never, never leave it —she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than to sit tight in it and float on and on.

(Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, p. 350)