the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at
sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all
the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying
grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young
woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who
looked young through successful indifference with her precious reference,
above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was
as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin
with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his
effort. They had communities of knowledge, "their" knowledge (this
discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the
other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a
man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity,
by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in
short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that
pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.

She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was
rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while
they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively
discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building
firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite "standing
up" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some
detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his
case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy
in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly
greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected
a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the
inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have
discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful