itch of interest, and with a candour that--no, certainly--he
had never seen equalled; every particular expensive object shrieking at
him in its artless pride that it had just "come home." He met the whole
vision with something of the grimace produced on persons without goggles
by the passage from a shelter to a blinding light; and if he had--by a
perfectly possible chance--been "snap-shotted" on the spot, would
have struck you as showing for his first tribute to the temple of Mrs.
Worthingham's charming presence a scowl almost of anguish. He wasn't
constitutionally, it may at once be explained for him, a goggled
person; and he was condemned, in New York, to this frequent violence of
transition--having to reckon with it whenever he went out, as who should
say, from himself. The high pitch of interest, to his taste, was the
pitch of history, the pitch of acquired and earned suggestion, the
pitch of association, in a word; so that he lived by preference,
incontestably, if not in a rich gloom, which would have been beyond his
means and spirits, at least amid objects and images that confessed to
the tone of time.

He had ever felt that an indispensable presence--with a need of it
moreover that interfered at no point with his gentle habit, not to say
his subtle art, of drawing out what was left him of his youth, of
thinly and thriftily spreading the rest of that choicest jam-pot of the
cupboard of consciousness over the remainder of a slice of life still
possibly thick enough to bear it; or in other words of moving the
melancholy limits, the significant signs, constantly a little further
on, very much as property-marks or staked boundaries are sometimes
stealthily shifted at night. He positively cherished in fact, as against
the too inveterate gesture of distressfully guarding his eyeballs--so
many New York aspects seemed to keep him at it--an ideal of adjusted
appreciation, of courageous curiosity, of fairly letting the world
about him, a world of constant breathless renewals and merciless
substitutions, make its flaring assault on its own inordinate terms.
Newness was value in the piece--for the acquisitor, or at least
sometimes might be, even though the act of "blowing" hard, the act
marking a heated freshness of arrival, or other form of irruption, could
never minister to the peace of those already and long on the field; and
this if only because maturer tone was after all most appreciable
and most consoling when one stagg