ave found this sublime had he quite dared
to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that side of his
privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary
degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of
corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of
uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere
shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective;
putting down his dim luminary he could still wander on without it, pass
into other rooms and, only knowing it was there behind him in case of
need, see his way about, visually project for his purpose a comparative
clearness. It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous
stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with
large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't verily be, for the poor
hard-pressed _alter ego_, to be confronted with such a type.

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs.
Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she
shouldn't notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the
upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through
the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below,
the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out.
This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and
he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and
impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed
to give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide
front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central
shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds,
was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the
house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The place was there
more subdivided; a large "extension" in particular, where small rooms for
servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets
and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase
over which he leaned, many a time, to look far down--not deterred from
his gravity even while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured
some solemn simpleton playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact he might
himself make that ironic _rapprochement_; but within the walls, and in
spi