e of observation in her,
picking out the frequent funny with extraordinary promptness, would
verily henceforth make a different thing for him of such experiences, of
the customary hunt for the possible prize, the inquisitive play of his
accepted monomania; which different thing could probably be a lighter
and perhaps thereby a somewhat more boisterously refreshing form
of sport. Such omens struck him as vivid, in any case, when Mr.
Gutermann-Seuss, with a sharpness of discrimination he had at first
scarce seemed to promise, invited his eminent couple into another
room, before the threshold of which the rest of the tribe, unanimously
faltering, dropped out of the scene. The treasure itself here, the
objects on behalf of which Mr. Verver's interest had been booked,
established quickly enough their claim to engage the latter's attention;
yet at what point of his past did our friend's memory, looking back
and back, catch him, in any such place, thinking so much less of wares
artfully paraded than of some other and quite irrelevant presence? Such
places were not strange to him when they took the form of bourgeois
back-parlours, a trifle ominously grey and grim from their north light,
at watering-places prevailingly homes of humbug, or even when they wore
some aspect still less, if not perhaps still more, insidious. He had
been everywhere, pried and prowled everywhere, going, on occasion, so
far as to risk, he believed, life, health and the very bloom of
honour; but where, while precious things, extracted one by one from
thrice-locked yet often vulgar drawers and soft satchels of old oriental
ilk, were impressively ranged before him, had he, till now, let himself,
in consciousness, wander like one of the vague?

He didn't betray it--ah THAT he knew; but two recognitions took place
for him at once, and one of them suffered a little in sweetness by the
confusion. Mr. Gutermann-Seuss had truly, for the crisis, the putting
down of his cards, a rare manner; he was perfect master of what not to
say to such a personage as Mr. Verver while the particular importance
that dispenses with chatter was diffused by his movements themselves,
his repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuble and a
table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton
cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal teas.
The Damascene tiles, successively, and oh so tenderly, unmuffled and
revealed, lay there at l