“off,” he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of infancy—­sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock of a wooden gun.  It was essentially, in him, the imitation of depravity—­which, for amusement, as might have been, he practised “keeping up.”  In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so artlessly-artful interludes were condemned, by the nature of the case, to brevity.  He had fatally stamped himself—­it was his own fault—­a man who could be interrupted with impunity.  The greatest of wonders, moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever have got, as the phrase was, should above all have got so early, to where he was.  It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that.  The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made of the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune.  This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions.

The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily contained—­these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they were one with perfection of machinery, they had constituted the kind of acquisitive power engendered and applied, the necessary triumph of all operations.  A dim explanation of phenomena once vivid must at all events for the moment suffice us; it being obviously no account of the matter to throw on our friend’s amiability alone the weight of the demonstration of his economic history.  Amiability, of a truth, is an aid to success; it has even been known to be the principle of large accumulations; but the link, for the mind, is none the less fatally missing between proof, on such a scale, of continuity, if of nothing more insolent, in one field, and accessibility to distraction in every other.  Variety of imagination—­what is that but fatal, in the world of affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished from monotony?  Mr. Verver then, for a fresh, full period, a period betraying, extraordinarily, no wasted year, had been inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud.  The cloud was his native envelope—­the soft looseness, so to say, of his temper and tone, not directly expressive enough, no doubt, to figure an amplitude of folds, but of a quality unmistakable for sensitive feelers.  He was still reduced, in fine,