ny fineness had remained, were often
startling, sometimes almost charming. But independently of this, and for
a much longer time, some principle of intelligence, some art of life,
would discernibly have worked in him. Remembered from college years and
from those two or three luckless and faithless ones of the Law School
as constitutionally common, as consistently and thereby doubtless even
rather powerfully coarse, clever only for uncouth and questionable
things, he yet presented himself now as if he had suddenly and
mysteriously been educated. There was a charm in his wide, "drawn,"
convalescent smile, in the way his fine fingers--had he anything like
fine fingers of old?--played, and just fidgeted, over the prompt and
perhaps a trifle incoherent offer of cigars, cordials, ashtrays,
over the question of his visitor's hat, stick, fur coat, general best
accommodation and ease; and how the deuce, accordingly, had charm, for
coming out so on top, Mark wondered, "squared" the other old elements?
For the short interval so to have dealt with him what force had it
turned on, what patented process, of the portentous New York order
in which there were so many, had it skilfully applied? Were these the
things New York did when you just gave her all her head, and that he
himself then had perhaps too complacently missed? Strange almost to the
point of putting him positively off at first--quite as an exhibition of
the uncanny--this sense of Newton's having all the while neither missed
nor muffed anything, and having, as with an eye to the _coup de theatre_
to come, lowered one's expectations, at the start, to that abject pitch.
It might have been taken verily for an act of bad faith--really for
such a rare stroke of subtlety as could scarce have been achieved by a
straight or natural aim.

So much as this at least came and went in Monteith's agitated mind; the
oddest intensity of apprehension, admiration, mystification, which the
high north-light of the March afternoon and the quite splendidly
vulgar appeal of fifty overdone decorative effects somehow fostered and
sharpened. Everything had already gone, however, the next moment,
for wasn't the man he had come so much too intelligently himself to
patronise absolutely bowling him over with the extraordinary speech:
"See here, you know--you must be ill, or have had a bad shock, or some
beastly upset: are you very sure you ought to have come out?" Yes, he
after an instant believed his ea