infinitely-handled

Updated: May 10, 2025

I am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had come, comparatively speaking, into her own the sight of her, accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region, down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, thing of the theatre, very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the orchestra might have been.

Henry James - A Small Boy and Others