the enormities, the depravities, of decoration and ingenuity, that, before his sense was unsealed, she had made him think lovely!  Musing, reconsidering little man that he was, and addicted to silent pleasures—­as he was accessible to silent pains—­he even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play, if his wife’s influence upon it had not been, in the strange scheme of things, so promptly removed.  Would she have led him altogether, attached as he was to her, into the wilderness of mere mistakes?  Would she have prevented him from ever scaling his vertiginous Peak?—­or would she, otherwise, have been able to accompany him to that eminence, where he might have pointed out to her, as Cortez to his companions, the revelation vouchsafed?  No companion of Cortez had presumably been a real lady:  Mr. Verver allowed that historic fact to determine his inference.

VIII

What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness.  It was the strange scheme of things again:  the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light.  A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another, and the preliminary would have been weak and wanting if the good faith of it had been less.  His comparative blindness had made the good faith, which in its turn had made the soil propitious for the flower of the supreme idea.  He had had to like forging and sweating, he had had to like polishing and piling up his arms.  They were things at least he had had to believe he liked, just as he had believed he liked transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling all for themselves, the creation of “interests” that were the extinction of other interests, the livid vulgarity, even, of getting in, or getting out, first.  That had of course been so far from really the case—­with the supreme idea, all the while, growing and striking deep, under everything, in the warm, rich earth.  He had stood unknowing, he had walked and worked where it was buried, and the fact itself, the fact of his fortune, would have been a barren fact enough if the first sharp tender shoot had never struggled into day.  There on one side was the ugliness his middle time had been spared; there on the other, from all the portents, was the beauty with which his age might still be crowned.  He was happier, doubtless, than he deserved; but that, when one was happy at all, it was easy to be.  He had wrought by devious ways, but he had reached the place, and what would ever have been straighter, in any man’s life, than his way, now, of occupying it?  It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock—­a house from whose open doors and windows,