This lady herself was not of the middle West—­she rather insisted on it—­but of New Jersey, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and most intimate States:  he couldn’t remember which, though she insisted too on that.  It was not in him—­we may say it for him—­to go so far as to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of her own; and this partly because she had struck him, verily, rather as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such connection as he enjoyed with the ironic question in general resided substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing it as easy to others.  He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former.  His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed, was in finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he had force.  It pressed upon him hard, and all round, assuredly, this attribution of power.  Everyone had need of one’s power, whereas one’s own need, at the best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it.  The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive would in most cases, beyond question, sufficiently discredit the cause; wherefore, though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain.  Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded the imputation of greed.  The other, the constant imputation, that of being able to “do,” would have no ground if he hadn’t been, to start with—­this was the point—­provably luxurious.  His lips, somehow, were closed—­and by a spring connected moreover with the action of his eyes themselves.  The latter showed him what he had done, showed him where he had come out; quite at the top of his hill of difficulty, the tall sharp spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent at the age of twenty, and the apex of which was a platform looking down, if one would, on the kingdoms of the earth and with standing-room for but half-a-dozen others.

His eyes, in any case, now saw Mrs. Rance approach with an instant failure to attach to the fact any grossness of avidity of Mrs. Rance’s own—­or at least to descry any triumphant use even for the luridest impression of her intensity.  What was virtually supreme would be her vision of his having attempted, by his desertion of the library, to mislead her—­which in point of fact barely escaped being what he had designed.  It was not easy for him, in spite of accumulations fondly and funnily regarded as of systematic practice, not now to be ashamed; the one thing comparatively easy would be to gloss over his course.  The billiard-room was not, at the particular crisis, either a natural or a graceful