ents--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation to
him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what
he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_
supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy
achievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer
herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want of
you, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity of
the article required was what might especially have caused him to
stagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder
dealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed
it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after
all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting
his wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of a
small strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,
truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that he
feared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always a
comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
ashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,
quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also
avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit
him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was of
being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little
that he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his position
that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him.
"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in
convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick
irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had
already seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes as
ugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--could
afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a
gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of this
impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yet
been so visible he had probably never felt