One Card Ends the Game

Maggie Verver knows one true word for what she is feeling, and she cannot afford to say it. Garth Greenwell watches Henry James hand her image after image instead: the tide, the golden mist, the actress forced to invent her lines mid-play, the card game she could end with a single card. Then the Matcham set comes to dinner and studies her like a specimen, and Maggie studies them back. Greenwell calls it her first ruthlessness, and the bitterest speech in the book so far is one she never says aloud. Two chapters of a woman waking up and deciding what her innocence is worth.