'I seemed to float not into clearness, but into
a darker obscure, and
within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity
the
appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the
instant
confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on
earth was I? Paralysed, while it
lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little . . .'
From The Turn of the Screw (1898), by Henry James
