He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process of his introduction to his present interests—­an introduction that had depended all on himself, like the “cheek” of the young man who approaches a boss without credentials or picks up an acquaintance, makes even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street.  His real friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which nobody had put him in relation.  He had knocked at the door of that essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back, he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night.  He had gained confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of the place it had been never again to come away.  All of which success represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride.  Pride in the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in something that had come, in comparison, so easily.  The right ground for elation was difficulty mastered, and his difficulty—­thanks to his modesty—­had been to believe in his facility.  This was the problem he had worked out to its solution—­the solution that was now doing more than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he wished to feel “good,” as they said at American City, he had but to retrace his immense development.  That was what the whole thing came back to—­that the development had not been somebody’s else passing falsely, accepted too ignobly, for his.  To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free.  The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press—­the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wife’s death.  It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover, with the way that there, above all, where the princes and Popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty most went to his head.  He was a plain American citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes, for days together, there were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art.  He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn’t afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were “placed” by their treatment of Michael Angelo.  Far below the plain American citizen—­in the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver.  Going to our friend’s head, moreover, some of the results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed there.  His freedom to see—­of which the comparisons were part—­what could it do but steadily grow and grow?