. Within doors and without Limbert's
life was overhung by an awful region that figured in his conversation,
comprehensively and with unpremeditated art, as Upstairs. It was
Upstairs that the thunder gathered, that Mrs. Stannace kept her accounts
and her state, that Mrs. Limbert had her babies and her headaches, that
the bells for ever jangled at the maids, that everything imperative in
short took place--everything that he had somehow, pen in hand, to meet
and dispose of in the little room on the garden-level. I don't think
he liked to go Upstairs, but no special burst of confidence was needed
to make me feel that a terrible deal of service went. It was the habit
of the ladies of the Stannace family to be extremely waited on, and I've
never been in a house where three maids and a nursery-governess
gave such an impression of a retinue. "Oh, they're so deucedly, so
hereditarily fine!"--I remember how that dropped from him in some
worried hour. Well, it was because Maud was so universally fine that
we had both been in love with her. It was not an air moreover for the
plaintive note: no private inconvenience could long outweigh for him the
great happiness of these years--the happiness that sat with us when we
talked and that made it always amusing to talk, the sense of his being
on the heels of success, coming closer and closer, touching it at last,
knowing that he should touch it again and hold it fast and hold it high.
Of course when we said success we didn't mean exactly what Mrs. Highmore
for instance meant. He used to quote at me as a definition something
from a nameless page of my own, some stray dictum to the effect that
the man of his craft had achieved it when of a beautiful subject his
expression was complete. Well, wasn't Limbert's in all conscience
complete?

III

It was bang upon this completeness all the same that the turn arrived,
the turn I can't say of his fortune--for what was that?--but of his
confidence, of his spirits and, what was more to the point, of his
system. The whole occasion on which the first symptom flared out is
before me as I write. I had met them both at dinner: they were diners
who had reached the penultimate stage--the stage which in theory is a
rigid selection and in practice a wan submission. It was late in the
season and stronger spirits than theirs were broken; the night was
close and the air of the banquet such as to restrict conversation to the
refusal of dishes and consumpt