He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue “officer” had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at two.  He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evening’s end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his hotel.  When he left his club, if he hadn’t been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club.  Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted:  there was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness.  He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations—­met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to edification, he was positively rather liked than not.  He was a dim secondary social success—­and all with people who had truly not an idea of him.  It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks—­just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of ombres chinoises.  He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’s wand.

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style.  This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—­in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it.  On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—­feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge.  The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities.