loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least
"minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and
sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle
materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and
challenge explanations and really "go into" figures.

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it
amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her
perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better-off for it, as
_he_ was--and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew,
ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of
life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in
Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost
unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to
any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed
to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown,
fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures--if he had
formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little
because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the
vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross
generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where
items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of
a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the
scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted
her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood oft,
in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did
battle when the challenge was really to "spirit," the spirit she after
all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better
time, that of _their_ common, their quite far-away and antediluvian
social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be,