Lie For Her, Lie To Her

Fanny Assingham knows what the summer in The Golden Bowl will cost her: she will have to lie for Maggie, and lie till she is black in the face. Her husband repeats the plan back with one word changed, and she insists it comes to the same thing. Garth Greenwell stops on that word. In this stretch of Henry James's The Golden Bowl, the smallest words carry the morality: for and to, with and against. And while Fanny practices her equivocations, Maggie does something stranger, working hard not to know the one thing she believes. Then the Colonel asks what happens if proof walks in, and Greenwell hears James making a promise.