their power of catching gleams or scents to right or left.

The lady looked up at her husband. The light of quiet, proprietary
affection shone in her calm grey eyes, decorously illumining her
features slightly reddened by the wind. And the husband looked back
at her, calm, practical, protecting. They were very much alike. So
doubtless he looked when he presented himself in snowy shirt-sleeves for
her to straighten the bow of his white tie; so nightly she would look,
standing before the full-length mirror, fixing his gifts upon her bosom.
Calm, proprietary, kind! He passed them and walked behind a second less
distinguished couple, who manifested a mutual dislike as matter-of-fact
and free from nonsense as the unruffled satisfaction of the first; this
dislike was just as healthy, and produced in Shelton about the same
sensation. It was like knocking at a never-opened door, looking at a
circle--couple after couple all the same. No heads, toes, angles of
their souls stuck out anywhere. In the sea of their environments they
were drowned; no leg braved the air, no arm emerged wet and naked waving
at the skies; shop-persons, aristocrats, workmen, officials, they were
all respectable. And he himself as respectable as any.

He returned, thus moody, to his rooms and, with the impetuosity which
distinguished him when about to do an unwise thing, he seized a pen and
poured out before Antonia some of his impressions:

... Mean is the word, darling; we are mean, that's what 's the matter
with us, dukes and dustmen, the whole human species--as mean as
caterpillars. To secure our own property and our own comfort, to dole
out our sympathy according to rule just so that it won't really hurt us,
is what we're all after. There's something about human nature that is
awfully repulsive, and the healthier people are, the more repulsive they