save for his own
presence, and from where he lingered he looked off at a stretch of lawn
freshened by recent April showers and on which sundry small children
were at play. The trees, the shrubs, the plants, every stem and twig
just ruffled as by the first touch of the light finger of the relenting
year, struck him as standing still in the blest hope of more of the same
caress; the quarter about him held its breath after the fashion of the
child who waits with the rigour of an open mouth and shut eyes for the
promised sensible effect of his having been good. So, in the windless,
sun-warmed air of the beautiful afternoon, the Park of the winter's
end had struck White-Mason as waiting; even New York, under such an
impression, was "good," good enough--for _him_; its very sounds were
faint, were almost sweet, as they reached him from so seemingly far
beyond the wooded horizon that formed the remoter limit of his large
shallow glade. The tones of the frolic infants ceased to be nondescript
and harsh--were in fact almost as fresh and decent as the frilled and
puckered and ribboned garb of the little girls, which had always a
way, in those parts, of so portentously flaunting the daughters of the
strange native--that is of the overwhelmingly alien--populace at him.

Not that these things in particular were his matter of meditation
now; he had wanted, at the end of his walk, to sit apart a little and
think--and had been doing that for twenty minutes, even though as yet
to no break in the charm of procrastination. But he had looked without
seeing and listened without hearing: all that had been positive for
him was that he hadn't failed vaguely to feel. He had felt in the first
place, and he continued to feel--yes, at forty-eight quite as much as at
any point of the supposed reign of younger intensities--the great spirit
of the air, the fine sense of the season, the supreme appeal of
Nature, he might have said, to his time of life; quite as if she, easy,
indulgent, indifferent, cynical Power, were offering him the last chance
it would rest with his wit or his blood to embrace. Then with that he
had been entertaining, to the point and with the prolonged consequence
of accepted immobilization, the certitude that if he did call on Mrs.
Worthingham and find her at home he couldn't in justice to himself not
put to her the question that had lapsed the other time, the last time,
through the irritating and persistent, even if accidental, pr