rily, for want of a connection and an
abutment, have scarce dared to face the void and the chill together, but
have sneaked back into the jungle and there tried to lose himself. He
made, as it was, the opposite effort, resolute to walk, though hovering
now and then at vague crossways, radiations of roads to nothing, or
taking cold counsel of the long but still sketchy vista, as it struck
him, of the northward Avenue, bright and bleak, fresh and harsh,
rich and evident somehow, a perspective like a page of florid
modern platitudes. He didn't quite know what he had expected for his
return--not certainly serenades and deputations; but without Mrs.
Ash his mail would have quite lacked geniality, and it was as if Phil
Blood-good had gone off not only with so large a slice of his small
_peculium_, but with all the broken bits of the past, the loose ends of
old relationships, that he had supposed he might pick up again. Well,
perhaps he should still pick up a few--by the sweat of his brow; no
motion of their own at least, he by this time judged, would send them
fluttering into his hand.

Which reflections but quickened his forecast of this charm of the old
Paris inveteracy renewed--the so-prized custom of nine years before,
when he still believed in results from his fond frequentation of the
Beaux Arts; that of walking over the river to the Rue de Marignan,
precisely, every Sunday without exception, and sitting at her fireside,
and often all offensively, no doubt, outstaying every one. How he
had used to want those hours then, and how again, after a little, at
present, the Rue de Marignan might have been before him! He had gone to
her there at that time with his troubles, such as they were, and they
had always worked for her amusement--which had been her happy, her
clever way of taking them: she couldn't have done anything better for
them in that phase, poor innocent things compared with what they might
have been, than be amused by them. Perhaps that was what she would still
be--with those of his present hour; now too they might inspire her with
the touch she best applied and was most instinctive mistress of: this
didn't at all events strike him as what he should most resent. It wasn't
as if Mrs. Folliott, to make up for boring him with her own plaint, for
example, had had so much as a gleam of conscious diversion over his.

"I'm _so_ delighted to see you, I've such immensities to tell you!"--it
began with the highest animati