there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering.
Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced
for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the
"set" commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been
she produced instead a vague platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished
and lived in--!"

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might
have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed
straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the
next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the
steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up
and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue,
which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the
traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they
stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it
_is_ lived in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for her to
sigh "Ah yes!" all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and his
favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their
course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls,
ineffaceable life.

It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again,
he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity--among
the people he met--about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at
none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his
"thinking" (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he was
wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism,
and it was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all
things come back to the question of what he personally might have been,