his
humility--that the material for the making had to be Mr. Verver's
millions. There was nothing else for him on earth to make it with; he
had tried before--had had to look about and see the truth. Humble as he
was, at the same time, he was not so humble as if he had known himself
frivolous or stupid. He had an idea--which may amuse his historian--that
when you were stupid enough to be mistaken about such a matter you did
know it. Therefore he wasn't mistaken--his future might be MIGHT be
scientific. There was nothing in himself, at all events, to prevent it.
He was allying himself to science, for it was science but the absence
of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full
of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition, which was in
its turn, too much, the consequence, or at least the exhalation, of
archives. He thought of these--of his not being at all events futile,
and of his absolute acceptance of the developments of the coming age to
redress the balance of his being so differently considered. The moments
when he most winced were those at which he found himself believing that,
really, futility would have been forgiven him. Even WITH it, in that
absurd view, he would have been good enough. Such was the laxity, in the
Ververs, of the romantic spirit. They didn't, indeed, poor dears, know
what, in that line--the line of futility--the real thing meant. HE did--
having seen it, having tried it, having taken its measure. This was a
memory in fact simply to screen out--much as, just in front of him while
he walked, the iron shutter of a shop, closing early to the stale summer
day, rattled down at the turn of some crank. There was machinery again,
just as the plate glass, all about him, was money, was power, the power
of the rich peoples. Well, he was OF them now, of the rich peoples; he
was on their side--if it wasn't rather the pleasanter way of putting it
that they were on his.

Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his
walk. It would have been ridiculous--such a moral from such a source--if
it hadn't all somehow fitted to the gravity of the hour, that gravity
the oppression of which I began by recording. Another feature was the
immediate nearness of the arrival of the contingent from home. He was to
meet them at Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had
married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that
had gilded the pill,