_those_ ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental
here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony
with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness
and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination--not, like
the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of
"society," bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really
having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that
when he had answered, after a brief demur, "Well, yes; so, precisely, you
may put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained
that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he
would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they
lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already
exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the
walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in
his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors,
which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years
of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly
three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended
there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the
very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a
woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She
scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could
agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the
last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And then how
do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here." It rather
indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least
in her sense of the words, "You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake
of it?"