up" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some
detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his
case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy
in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly
greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected
a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the
inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have
discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful
architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold mine. He was to
remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring
they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most
disguised and most muffled vibrations.

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had
broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment:
it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged
the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very
much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected
occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The
quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed
rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door
behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a
room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed
start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the
middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to
the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other
and always so much the better one, which in the eastward direction formed
one of the corners,--the "jolly" one precisely, of the street now so
generally dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the
comparatively conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as
Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old
names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to
stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you
might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe
restoration to shelter.

They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as
he kept no one there,