There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend’s having herself broken out, after a yearning look round:  “But I hope you don’t mean they want you to pull this to pieces!” His answer came, promptly, with his re-awakened wrath:  it was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were “at” him for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn’t for their life understand a man’s liability to decent feelings.  He had found the place, just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy.  There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short—!  But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up.  “In short you’re to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!” Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination—­not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of “society,” bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody’s really having any.  It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demur, “Well, yes; so, precisely, you may put it!” her imagination would still do him justice.  He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather’s, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes.  She listened to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn’t chatter.  She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that.  Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself.  “And then how do you know?  You may still, after all, want to live here.”  It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn’t what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words, “You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?”

“Well, with such a home—!” But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an i, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn’t rattle.  How could any one—­of any wit—­insist on any one else’s “wanting” to live in New York?