THE SENSE OF THE PAST
burst of confidence, this compensating vision, he would have liked exceedingly to see it, even at whatever cost to his own pride; but she nursed it now, at least to begin with, in silence, only signing faintly, to his embarrassment, with her grand thick-braided head. What this most suggested to him was that if at twenty-two she had married a condemned consumptive she wouldn't now, at thirty, marry a mere thinker—which was what Ralph amusedly knew himself to pass for in New York, where the character indeed is held almost as much in honour as that of the dervish in the East and where once, at his door, it had been all but set down to him as professional by the man calling about the Census or the Directory. Aurora Coyne's backers, her ancestor and her late husband's, as Park Avenue so often termed grandparents and parents, were members of the local Chamber of Commerce, but he himself should more fitly have been a Malatesta or a Sforza: then she might have been contracted to a despot or a condottiere. Within the quarter of an hour he had completely lowered his crest. "I see, I see," he said, "I'm even less possible to you than I feared; and heaven knows I hadn't sinned by presumption." She continued to say little in reply—so little that, to ease positively for herself the awkwardness of so few attenuations, he risked expressing her view, risked even, for charity, making her contradict him. He imputed to her
10
