He made, however, one concession to his father: he consented to a
reduction in his allowance.

He had led himself to believe that now, at last, in the town of his birth
the career of a man of leisure was completely practicable. During his
long absence from home his family had sent him at intervals copies of the
local newspapers--sheets whose utterances were triumphantly optimistic,
even beyond their triumphant and optimistic wont. Furthermore, his
courses over the Continent had brought him into contact with many
travellers more lately from home than himself, whose strange and topping
tales--carried, indeed, in a direction the reverse of that taken by most
such reports--had told him much of contemporaneous achievement behind
them, and had filled him with a half-belief that no expectations founded
on such a base could be exorbitant. A great light had arisen; the city,
notably a metropolis for many years already, had opened out into a
cosmopolis; the poet had at last arrived, and the earth was now tolerable
for the foot of man.

He visited on the South shore the great white shell from which the spirit
had taken its formal leave but a week before, and he acknowledged the
potency of the poet's spell. "It _is_ good," he assented; "better than I
could have thought--better than anybody over there could be made to
believe. I might have tried to get home a fortnight sooner, perhaps."

He met half-way the universal expectation that the spirit of the White
City was but just transferred to the body of the great Black City close
at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment--through which it
might permeate as an informing force.

"Good!" he thought; "there's no place where it's needed more or where it