o he was--by which he meant know who and what it was to _be_
a White-Mason, even a poor and a dear and old one, "anyway." That
indeed--he did her perfect justice--was of the very essence of the
newness and freshness and beautiful, brave, social irresponsibility by
which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of
her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a
single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his
already almost legendary past; and that additional one of his, on his
side, having, so far as this went, cultivated blankness, cultivated
positive prudence, as to her own personal background--the vagueness,
at the best, with which all honest gentlefolk, the New Yorkers of his
approved stock and conservative generation, were content, as for the
most part they were indubitably wise, to surround the origins and
antecedents and queer unimaginable early influences of persons swimming
into their ken from those parts of the country that quite necessarily
and naturally figured to their view as "Godforsaken" and generally
impossible.

The few scattered surviving representatives of a society once
"good"--_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_--were liable, at the pass things
had come to, to meet, and even amid old shades once sacred, or what was
left of such, every form of social impossibility, and, more irresistibly
still, to find these apparitions often carry themselves (often at
least in the case of the women) with a wondrous wild gallantry, equally
imperturbable and inimitable, the sort of thing that reached its maximum
in Mrs. Worthingham. Beyond that who ever wanted to look up their
annals, to reconstruct their steps and stages, to dot their i's in fine,
or to "go behind" anything that was theirs? One wouldn't do that for
the world--a rudimentary discretion forbade it; and yet this check from
elementary undiscussable taste quite consorted with a due respect for
them, or at any rate with a due respect for oneself in connection with
them; as was just exemplified in what would be his own, what would be
poor dear old White-Mason's, insurmountable aversion to having, on any
pretext, the doubtless very queer spectre of the late Mr. Worthingham
presented to him. No question had he asked, or would he ever ask, should
his life--that is should the success of his courtship--even intimately
depend on it, either about that obscure agent of his mistress's actual
affluence or