ng, the positive mystification he felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the
walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in
his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors,
which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years
of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly
three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended
there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the
very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a
woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She
scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could
agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the
last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And then how
do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here." It rather
indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least
in her sense of the words, "You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake
of it?"

"Well, _with_ such a home--!" But, quite beautifully, she had too much
tact to dot so monstrous an _i_, and it was precisely an illustration of
the way she didn't rattle. How could any one--of any wit--insist on any
one else's "wanting" to live in New York?

"Oh," he said, "I _might_ have lived here (since I had my opportunity
early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then
everything would have been different enough--and, I dare say, 'funny'
enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of it--I mean of
my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal'--is just in the total
absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the
matter at all it would _have_ to be the other way, and would then be
inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here _but_ of
dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever--not the ghost of one."

They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood
the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main
saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows.
Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. "Are you
very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't, much rather, serve--?"

He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were
then