ch projected light, continued to have for him
the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been
reached in his great "finds"--continued, beyond any other, to keep him
attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had
we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of
value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say,
and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man
was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster
of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass
everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried
in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass
cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept
in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a
deposed dynasty. As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak,
both about Amerigo and about the Bernadino Luini he had happened to come
to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of
his daughter's betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself
about Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of
which he had lately got wind, to which a provoking legend was attached,
and as to which he had made out, contentedly, that further news was to
be obtained from a certain Mr. Gutermann-Seuss of Brighton. It was all,
at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn
with a cold, still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material
directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic
beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, in
spite of the general tendency of the "devouring element" to spread,
the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scattered, and tended with
unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds
from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires. Adam Verver had in
other words learnt the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own
little book, without having, for a day, raised the smallest scandal
in his economy at large; being in this particular not unlike those
fortunate bachelors, or other gentlemen of pleasure, who so manage
their entertainment of compromising company that even the austerest
housekeeper, occupied and competent below-stairs, never feels obliged
to give warning.

That f