“Every one asks me what I ‘think’
of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and
I make answer as I can—begging or dodging
the question, putting them off with any nonsense.
It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,”
he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet
in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on
so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still
be almost altogether about something that concerns
only myself.” He was talking to Miss Staverton,
with whom for a couple of months now he had availed
himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition
and this resource, this comfort and support, as the
situation in fact presented itself, having promptly
enough taken the first place in the considerable array
of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so
strangely belated return to America. Everything
was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural
when one had so long and so consistently neglected
everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin
for play. He had given them more than thirty
years—thirty-three, to be exact; and they
now seemed to him to have organised their performance
quite on the scale of that licence. He had been
twenty-three on leaving New York—he was
fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as
he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself
feeling; in which case he would have lived longer
than is often allotted to man. It would have
taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and
said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken
a longer absence and a more averted mind than those
even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences,
the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses,
for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted
his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the
incalculability; since he had supposed himself,
from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the
most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy
of change. He actually saw that he had allowed
for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure
of finding, he found what he would never have imagined.
Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things
he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth,
when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the
ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him
rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the
“swagger” things, the modern, the monstrous,
the famous things, those he had more particularly,
like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year,
come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay.
They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above
all for reaction, of which his restless tread was
constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting,
doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been
too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth
saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in
