Pity and Dread

The last chapter of Henry James's The Golden Bowl is a farewell staged in a drawing room, and Garth Greenwell will not let its strangest sentence pass: two people, seated at tea, described the way you would describe the chairs. The money talk that opened the novel comes back at its close, and Greenwell asks what it is protecting and what it costs. Then he reads the final sentence aloud, the sentence that gives this episode its name, and makes the case that James hid a tragedy inside its happy ending. The series ends where the book does.