moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in
his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He affected me somehow
as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent. He had
evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet
what was that compared to his obvious future? He was just enough
above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long
in the flank. He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and
yet I could see it cost him something. It cost him small spasms of
the self-consciousness that is an Englishman's last and dearest
treasure--the thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small
pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in "Quentin
Durward" broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had been
thirty-eight years old at the time "Beltraffio" was published. He
asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in
England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen
there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very
form of his questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as
if I were somehow myself having the use of it.

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there
was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and
books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were
muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a
masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many
things struck me at that time, in England--as reproductions of
something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not
the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy;
these things were the originals, and the life of happy and
distinguished people was fashioned in their image. Mark Ambient
called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if