Cornelia returned--"and, for that
matter, of course I am! But she's young and lovely and rich and clever:
so what could be more natural?"

"Oh, I was applying that opprobrious epithet--!" He didn't finish,
though he meant he had applied it to himself. He had got up from his
seat; he turned about and, taking in, as his eyes also roamed, several
objects in the room, serene and sturdy, not a bit cheap-looking, little
old New York objects of '68, he made, with an inner art, as if to
recognise them--made so, that is, for himself; had quite the sense for
the moment of asking them, of imploring them, to recognise _him_, to be
for him things of his own past. Which they truly were, he could have
the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of
them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but
spectrally faded, hadn't in every particular, frames and balloon skirts
and false "property" balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all,
the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual
imminent ache of one's protective scowl, one would verily but have to
let the scowl stiffen, or to take up seriously the question of blue
goggles, during what might remain of life.

V

What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table that
piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a
crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for
commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that
view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and
fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he
both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there
another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in
his hand, only holding it now a litde behind him. "You _must_ have come
back to stay--with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?"

"'Beautiful'?" his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and
her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate
have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. "Oh, don't talk
so--after Mrs. Worthingham's! _They're_ wonderful, if you will: such
things, such things! But one's own poor relics and odds and ends are
one's own at least; and one _has_--yes--come back to them. They're all
I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was
paying--!" Miss Rasch wofully