gerly
reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the
very breath of the Golden Isles. To rifle the Golden Isles had, on
the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of
it--what was most wondrous of all--still more even in the thought than
in the act. The thought was that of the affinity of Genius, or at least
of Taste, with something in himself--with the dormant intelligence of
which he had thus almost violently become aware and that affected him as
changing by a mere revolution of the screw his whole intellectual
plane. He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and
encouragers of beauty--and he didn't after all perhaps dangle so far
below the great producers and creators. He had been nothing of that kind
before-too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been
what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success;
now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the
immense meaning it had waited for.

It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife,
when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had
so broken--and he had even made out at that time why, on an earlier
occasion, the journey of his honeymoon year, it had still been closely
covered. He had "bought" then, so far as he had been able, but he had
bought almost wholly for the frail, fluttered creature at his side, who
had had her fancies, decidedly, but all for the art, then wonderful
to both of them, of the Rue de la Paix, the costly authenticities of
dressmakers and jewellers. Her flutter--pale disconcerted ghost as she
actually was, a broken white flower tied round, almost grotesquely for
his present sense, with a huge satin "bow" of the Boulevard--her flutter
had been mainly that of ribbons, frills and fine fabrics; all funny,
pathetic evidence, for memory, of the bewilderments overtaking them as a
bridal pair confronted with opportunity. He could wince, fairly, still,
as he remembered the sense in which the poor girl's pressure had, under
his fond encouragement indeed, been exerted in favour of purchase and
curiosity. These were wandering images, out of the earlier dusk, that
threw her back, for his pity, into a past more remote than he liked
their common past, their young affection, to appear. It would have had
to be admitted, to an insistent criticism, that Maggie's mother, all too
strangely, had not so much fai