JAMES'S AIR OF EVIL
broke down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I
had seen her do before, gave way to all the grief of it.
It was in quite another manner that I, for my part, let myself go.
"Oh, thank God!"
She sprang up at this, drying her eyes with a groan. "Thank God?"
"It so justifies me!"
"It does that, Miss."
Mrs. Grose then goes on to say that the child has been abusing
the governess in language which she "can't think wherever she must
have picked up." But immediately she adds, "Well, perhaps I ought
to also--since I've heard some of it before." She has heard it "be–
fore," of course, from Miss
J
essel herself. Finally the governess asks
her:
"Then, in spite of yesterday, you
believe?"
"In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in
the light of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me
the whole thing as she had never done :
"I believe."
Should there, after all this, remain ,any doubt in the reader's
mind as to the reality of the apparitions, let
him
now glance back
at the beginning of the story,
before
Peter Quint'S ghost first appears.
The governess has just arrived at Bly, knowing nothing of her un–
happy predecessors. Immediately she senses that Mrs. Grose is strange–
ly glad to see her: "I perceived within half an hour that she was
so glad--stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman-as to be
positively on her guard against showing
it
too much. I wondered
even then a little why she should not wish to show it ..." It is sev–
eral times hinted, at the first of the story, that the housekeeper is
uneasy, that she is trying to conceal a suspicion that everything is
not as it should be-a suspicion which she could only have arrived at
independently, since the governess has barely arrived.
The governess, who has not even met the children yet, spends
a rather uneasy first night: "There had been moments when I believe
I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been an–
other when I found myself just consciously starting as at the pas–
sage, before my door, of a light footstep." From the very beginning
James spares no pains in informing us that supernatural forces are
at work within the house: the housekeeper is already aware of them,
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