differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for
the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he
looked.

The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability;
since he _had_ supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing,
and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change.
He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would
have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined.
Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected,
the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up
to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it
happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger" things, the modern, the
monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like
thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were
exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for
displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was
constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole
show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer
truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier
light, come over _all_ for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in
the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with
which they had nothing to do. He had come--putting the thing
pompously--to look at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a
century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less
sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the
jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it--the one in
which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family
had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood
had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence