it--his innermost secret, not confided
even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood,
to his view, everything--thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of
occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that
blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to
which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of
whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that
idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved
in the preservation by an adult of one of childhood's toys. When he took
a rare moment "off," he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of
a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of
infancy--sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock
of a wooden gun. It was essentially, in him, the IMITATION of
depravity--which, for amusement, as might have been, he practised
"keeping up." In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so
artlessly-artful interludes were condemned, by the nature of the case,
to brevity. He had fatally stamped himself--it was his own fault--a
man who could be interrupted with impunity. The greatest of wonders,
moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever
have got, as the phrase was, should above all have got so early, to
where he was. It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of
that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward
vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of
a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American
breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made
of the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This
establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which,
at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers,
perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the
scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for
producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge
could not have communicated even with the best intentions.

The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral
temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily
contained--these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they
were one with perfection of machinery, they had constituted the kind of
acquisitiv