cts of current finance were as harsh
and metallic and bewildering as some stacked "exhibit" of ugly patented
inventions, things his mediaeval mind forbade his taking in. He had
for instance the sense of knowing the pleasant little old Rasch
fortune--pleasant as far as it went; blurred memories and impressions
of what it had been and what it hadn't, of how it had grown and how
languished and how melted; they came back to him and put on such
vividness that he could almost have figured himself testify for them
before a bland and encouraging Board. The idea of taking the field in
any manner on the subject of Mrs. Worthingham's resources would have
affected him on the other hand as an odious ordeal, some glare of
embarrassment and exposure in a circle of hard unhelpful attention, of
converging, derisive, unsuggestive eyes.

In Cornelia's small and quite cynically modern flat--the house had
a grotesque name, "The Gainsborough," but at least wasn't an awful
boarding-house, as he had feared, and she could receive him quite
honourably, which was so much to the good--he would have been ready to
use at once to her the greatest freedom of friendly allusion: "Have
you still your old 'family interest' in those two houses in Seventh
Avenue?--one of which was next to a corner grocery, don't you know? and
was occupied as to its lower part by a candy-shop where the proportion
of the stock of suspectedly stale popcorn to that of rarer and stickier
joys betrayed perhaps a modest capital on the part of your father's,
your grandfather's, or whoever's tenant, but out of which I nevertheless
remember once to have come as out of a bath of sweets, with my very
garments, and even the separate hairs of my head, glued together.
The other of the pair, a tobacconist's, further down, had before it a
wonderful huge Indian who thrust out wooden cigars at an indifferent
world--you could buy candy cigars too, at the pop-corn shop, and I
greatly preferred them to the wooden; I remember well how I used to gape
in fascination at the Indian and wonder if the last of the Mohicans was
like him; besides admiring so the resources of a family whose 'property'
was in such forms. I haven't been round there lately--we must go round
together; but don't tell me the forms have utterly perished!" It was
after _that_ fashion he might easily have been moved, and with almost
no transition, to break out to Cornelia--quite as if taking up some old
talk, some old community of