criss-crossed lines and figures--if he had
formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little
because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the
vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross
generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where
items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of
a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the
scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted
her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood oft,
in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did
battle when the challenge was really to "spirit," the spirit she after
all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better
time, that of _their_ common, their quite far-away and antediluvian
social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be,
the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at
sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all
the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying
grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young
woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who
looked young through successful indifference with her precious reference,
above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was
as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin
with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his
effort. They had communities of knowledge, "their" knowledge (this
discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the
other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a
man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity,
by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in
short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that
pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.

She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was
rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while
they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively
discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building
firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite "standing