tion we have hinted at, it had not yet
been. He thought, in a loose, an almost agitated order, of many things;
the power that was in them to agitate having been part of his conviction
that he should not soon sleep. He truly felt for a while that he should
never sleep again till something had come to him; some light, some idea,
some mere happy word perhaps, that he had begun to want, but had been
till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly groping for. "Can
you really then come if we start early?"--that was practically all he
had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And "Why in
the world not, when I've nothing else to do, and should, besides, so
immensely like it?"--this had as definitely been, on her side, the limit
of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene,
even of the littlest, at all--though he perhaps didn't quite know why
something like the menace of one hadn't proceeded from her stopping
half-way upstairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she
promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and
a sponge. There hovered about him, at all events, while he walked,
appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and
not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of
being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have
noted, one of the minor yet so far as there were any such, quite one of
the compensatory, incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him,
up to now, that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo, as
through some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret; so
that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had
unmistakably acquired it, through the young man's having amiably passed
it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this
might be, of quite the same shades of attention and recognition, was
mistress in an equal degree of the regulated, the developed art of
placing him high in the scale of importance. That was even for his own
thought a clumsy way of expressing the element of similarity in the
agreeable effect they each produced on him, and it held him for a little
only because this coincidence in their felicity caused him vaguely to
connect or associate them in the matter of tradition, training, tact,
or whatever else one might call it. It might almost have been--if such
a link between them was to be imagine