relief; but it also made
rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that
already gave her something in common with the Miss Condrips.

BOOK SECOND

III

Merton Densher, who passed the best hours of each night at the office
of his newspaper, had at times, during the day, to make up for it, a
sense, or at least an appearance, of leisure, in accordance with which
he was not infrequently to be met, in different parts of the town, at
moments when men of business are hidden from the public eye. More than
once, during the present winter's end, he had deviated, toward three
o'clock, or toward four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might for a
while, on each occasion, have been observed to demean himself as a
person with nothing to do. He made his way indeed, for the most part,
with a certain directness, over to the north side; but once that ground
was reached his behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved
seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and
remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a
bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the
vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with
nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was
not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make
had the effect of causing the burden of proof, in certain directions,
to rest on him. It was a little the fault of his aspect, his personal
marks, which made it almost impossible to name his profession.

He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on
certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman,
by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally
sound and generally pleasant; yet, though to that degree neither
extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play straight into
an observer's hands. He was young for the House of Commons, he was
loose for the army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the
city, and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, he was sceptical, it
might have been felt, for the church. On the other hand he was
credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was
perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry, and
yet too little in them for art. You would have got fairly near him by
making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but yo