ht" her, to put it crudely, but it was
almost as if she were herself, in her greater gaiety, her livelier
curiosity and intensity, her readier, happier irony, taking him about
and showing him the place. No one, really, when he came to think, had
ever taken him about before--it had always been he, of old, who took
others and who in particular took Maggie. This quickly fell into its
relation with him as part of an experience--marking for him, no doubt,
what people call, considerately, a time of life; a new and pleasant
order, a flattered passive state, that might become--why shouldn't it?--
one of the comforts of the future.

Mr. Gutermann-Seuss proved, on the second day--our friend had waited
till then--a remarkably genial, a positively lustrous young man
occupying a small neat house in a quarter of the place remote from the
front and living, as immediate and striking signs testified, in the
bosom of his family. Our visitors found themselves introduced, by
the operation of close contiguity, to a numerous group of ladies and
gentlemen older and younger, and of children larger and smaller, who
mostly affected them as scarce less anointed for hospitality and
who produced at first the impression of a birthday party, of some
anniversary gregariously and religiously kept, though they subsequently
fell into their places as members of one quiet domestic circle,
preponderantly and directly indebted for their being, in fact, to Mr.
Gutermann-Seuss. To the casual eye a mere smart and shining youth of
less than thirty summers, faultlessly appointed in every particular, he
yet stood among his progeny--eleven in all, as he confessed without a
sigh, eleven little brown clear faces, yet with such impersonal old eyes
astride of such impersonal old noses--while he entertained the great
American collector whom he had so long hoped he might meet, and whose
charming companion, the handsome, frank, familiar young lady, presumably
Mrs. Verver, noticed the graduated offspring, noticed the fat,
ear-ringed aunts and the glossy, cockneyfied, familiar uncles,
inimitable of accent and assumption, and of an attitude of cruder
intention than that of the head of the firm; noticed the place in short,
noticed the treasure produced, noticed everything, as from the habit
of a person finding her account at any time, according to a wisdom well
learned of life, in almost any "funny" impression. It really came home
to her friend on the spot that this free rang