een in the habit of living, on the product of
these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the
second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a
twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved
beautifully possible.

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his
arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the
street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of
reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before,
to overtures for this conversion--in which, now that it was going
forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself
able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such
experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a
certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such
concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he
scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his
mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for
construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been
dormant in his own organism--where it might be said of them perhaps that
they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn
weather--the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place--he
loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least
"minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and
sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle
materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and
challenge explanations and really "go into" figures.

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it
amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her
perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better-off for it, as
_he_ was--and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew,
ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of
life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in
Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost
unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to
any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed
to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown,
fantastic, of ruled and