or of that
essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been
immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back,
he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed
stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained
confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of
the place it had been never again to come away. All of which success
represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride. Pride in
the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in
something that had come, in comparison, so easily. The right ground
for elation was difficulty mastered, and his difficulty--thanks to his
modesty--had been to believe in his facility. THIS was the problem he
had worked out to its solution--the solution that was now doing more
than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he
wished to feel "good," as they said at American City, he had but to
retrace his immense development. That was what the whole thing came back
to--that the development had not been somebody's else passing falsely,
accepted too ignobly, for his. To think how servile he might have been
was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to
admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded
to his touch was always there to press--the memory of his freedom as
dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter
divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his
wife's death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in
particular that he could usually best recover, with the way that
there, above all, where the princes and Popes had been before him, his
divination of his faculty most went to his head. He was a plain American
citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes, for days together, there
were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read
a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art.
He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn't afraid, and he had on the
whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal
of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were "placed" by their
treatment of Michael Angelo. Far below the plain American citizen--in
the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain
to be Adam Verver. Going to our friend's head, moreover, some of the
results of such compari