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Updated: May 13, 2025
He would show us the English upper and middle class, shaken out of its comfort and complacency, its easy and patronizing security, by the shock of war and bereavement, facing a future of unknown and terrifying ideas and forces, with the brutal tax-gatherer administering the coup de grâce to its equanimity: the working class, called to fight for a cause which it but dimly understood, in the hope of a new world which victory was to call into being, exhorted by the nation's leaders to be as daring in its home policies as in the trenches, and then confronted with a world of failing markets and impoverished customers and with the full rigour of the merciless laws of supply and demand which, just because it had wished them out of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the intensity of her sensitive nature, to be able to resume, in security and quietness of mind, the arts and activities of normal life in which she has been, and will be again, the Athens of the modern world: Germany, tougher in fibre than her western neighbour yet equally shaken and exhausted: a land of sheep without a shepherd, rushing hither and thither seeking for a direction and a Weltanschauung, her amazing powers of industry and concentration and her rich and turbid life of feeling running to waste for lack of channelled guidance: Belgium, self-confident, industrious and rejuvenated: Italy, made one at last and measuring her strength to face the tasks of a new epoch in her history: and, behind, the great new surging world of the Slav, from the disciplined enthusiasm of Prague, under her philosopher-president, to the birth-agonies of a new Russia in the grip of the rough tyrant-physicians of the Kremlin.
She twined her arm in his, looking up into his face with a little smile, half-mocking, half-wistful. He stooped to kiss her. "Well, what does the bounder want?" "Oh, nothing much," she said.
He rose and tossed it into the fire, in front of which he remained standing a slender, eager, restless young figure, with a touch of hunger in the fine face, strangely like and unlike the father, at whom he looked with half-wistful curiosity. "The fact is, sir," he continued, "there is such a case in my mind now, and it is a good deal on my heart, too.
Chad Newsome was doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with the sharpness of their opposition at this particular hour; he was to remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came with him and with Strether to the street and stood there with a face half-wistful and half-rueful.
He rose and tossed it into the fire, in front of which he remained standing a slender, eager, restless young figure, with a touch of hunger in the fine face, strangely like and unlike the father, at whom he looked with half-wistful curiosity. "The fact is, sir," he continued, "there is such a case in my mind now. So I thought of speaking to you about it to-night.
"No," she answered with a little smile, half-whimsical, half-wistful. "You haven't done anything. It's what you're going to do that hurts." "Mollie, you've been crying." "I have not!" snapped Mollie, turning so the light would not fall on her face. "Well, what are your eyes and nose all red for then?" asked Amy reasonably. "Ask them," retorted Mollie. "Probably just did it to make me mad."
Something in the half-wistful smile of her companion brought the old lady quickly back from the realms of recollection, and a pair of keen, kindly eyes met the steady gray-black orbs of the girl. "Ah, Jacky, my child, we of the frivolous sex are always being forced into considering the mundane matters of everyday life here at Foss River. What is it, dear?
Once she smiled a little, and once she looked around at me with a curious, timid, half-wistful expression in her eyes. "Maggie," I said, "I wish you could go to the country." "I wish to God I could," she replied. We walked for a moment in silence. My head was whirling with thoughts: again I had that feeling of helplessness, of inadequacy, which I had felt so sharply on the previous evening.
The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read and mused.
"You look like the effigy of a young knight asleep on his tomb," she said, carefully tracing the well-cut profile defined against the dark stone. "Wish I was!" "That's a foolish wish, unless you have spoiled your life. You are so changed, I sometimes think " there Amy stopped, with a half-timid, half-wistful look, more significant than her unfinished speech.
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