or Tom Corey, as it often did in
a community where every one's generation is known to the remotest
degrees of cousinship, they could not trace his sweetness to his
mother, for neither Anna Bellingham nor any of her family, though they
were so many blocks of Wenham ice for purity and rectangularity, had
ever had any such savour; and, in fact, it was to his father, whose
habit of talk wronged it in himself, that they had to turn for this
quality of the son's. They traced to the mother the traits of
practicality and common-sense in which he bordered upon the
commonplace, and which, when they had dwelt upon them, made him seem
hardly worth the close inquiry they had given him.

While the summer wore away he came and went methodically about his
business, as if it had been the business of his life, sharing his
father's bachelor liberty and solitude, and expecting with equal
patience the return of his mother and sisters in the autumn. Once or
twice he found time to run down to Mt. Desert and see them; and then
he heard how the Philadelphia and New York people were getting in
everywhere, and was given reason to regret the house at Nahant which he
had urged to be sold. He came back and applied himself to his desk
with a devotion that was exemplary rather than necessary; for Lapham
made no difficulty about the brief absences which he asked, and set no
term to the apprenticeship that Corey was serving in the office before
setting off upon that mission to South America in the early winter, for
which no date had yet been fixed.

The summer was a dull season for the paint as well as for everything
else. Till things should brisk up, as Lapham said, in the fall, he was
letting the new house take a great deal of his time. AEsthetic ideas
had never been intelligibly presented to him before, and he found a
delight in apprehending them that was very grateful to his imaginative
architect. At the beginning, the architect had foreboded a series of
mortifying defeats and disastrous victories in his encounters with his
client; but he had never had a client who could be more reasonably led
on from one outlay to another. It appeared that Lapham required but to
understand or feel the beautiful effect intended, and he was ready to
pay for it. His bull-headed pride was concerned in a thing which the
architect made him see, and then he believed that he had seen it
himself, perhaps conceived it. In some measure the architect seemed to
share