consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly,
old relations--met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and
seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such
different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as
ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to
edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim
secondary social success--and all with people who had truly not an idea
of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome,
this popping of their corks--just as his gestures of response were the
extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some
game of _ombres chinoises_. He projected himself all day, in thought,
straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the
other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard
behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly
corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music
follows the tap of the conductor's wand.

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the
old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he
remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in
him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This
effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who
should say where?--in the depths of the house, of the past, of that
mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for
weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same
thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner--feeling the place
once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave
crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its
edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world,
and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the