ns, purveyors and consumers,
in his own and the circumjacent commonwealths, of comic matter in large
lettering, diurnally "set up," printed, published, folded and delivered,
at the expense of his presumptuous emulation of the snail. The snail
had become for him, under this ironic suggestion, the loveliest beast
in nature, and his return to England, of which we are present witnesses,
had not been unconnected with the appreciation so determined. It marked
what he liked to mark, that he needed, on the matter in question,
instruction from no one on earth. A couple of years of Europe again, of
renewed nearness to changes and chances, refreshed sensibility to the
currents of the market, would fall in with the consistency of wisdom,
the particular shade of enlightened conviction, that he wished to
observe. It didn't look like much for a whole family to hang about
waiting-they being now, since the birth of his grandson, a whole
family; and there was henceforth only one ground in all the world, he
felt, on which the question of appearance would ever really again count
for him. He cared that a work of art of price should "look like" the
master to whom it might perhaps be deceitfully attributed; but he had
ceased on the whole to know any matter of the rest of life by its looks.

He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was not
actually taking it as a collector, he was taking it, decidedly, as a
grandfather. In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing
so precious as the Principino, his daughter's first-born, whose Italian
designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate
and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he couldn't a
correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre. He could take
the small clutching child from his nurse's arms with an iteration grimly
discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of
high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had,
moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his
silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been
so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude--reduce it, he
said, to that--in his easy weeks at Fawns. The element of attitude was
all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot, even
more than he had hoped: enjoying it in spite of Mrs. Rance and the Miss
Lutches; in spite of the small worry of his belief that Fanny