The Jolly Corner | Page 7

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?
"Oh," he said, "I MIGHT have lived here (since I had my opportunity
early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then everything
would have been different enough - and, I dare say, 'funny' enough. But
that's another matter. And then the beauty of it - I mean of my
perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal' - is just in the total absence
of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it
would HAVE to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a
reason of dollars? There are no reasons here BUT of dollars. Let us
therefore have none whatever - not the ghost of one."
They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they
stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square
main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between
windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a
moment. "Are you very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't, much rather,
serve - ?"
He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were
then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a
grin: "Oh ghosts - of course the place must swarm with them! I should
be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I
haven't asked her to do more than look in."
Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't utter, it was
clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for the minute, off
there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering.
Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced
for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the "set"
commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been
she produced instead a vague platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished
and lived in - !"
She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might

have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed
straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the
next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her
on the steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key,
looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of
the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the
Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked
before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech.
"For me it IS lived in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for
her to sigh "Ah yes!" all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and
his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run
their course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls,
ineffaceable life.
It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again,
he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity - among
the people he met - about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived
at none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his
"thinking" (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he was
wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism,
and it was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all
things come back to the question of what he personally might have
been, how he