THE SENSE OF THE PAST
pride, before the inexpressive front. The pride was for all he was already aware of within, while the diffidence was for the caretaker and her husband, a mature and obese but irreproachably formal policeman—persons of high respectability both, placed in charge by Mr. Pendrel's executors, to whom he feared to show as frivolous in knocking yet again. Was he not for that matter frivolous actually and sufficiently, he more than once asked himself, carried off his intellectual feet to such a point by an accident that would have had for most people a mere relation to their income? He was conscious enough that what had thus caught him up to flights of fancy was an object of a class more definable than almost any other as of the reverse of extraordinary, a London house of the elder, larger, finer type, of an age long anterior to the age of jerry-building, but still after all a mere grey square section of a street, passed and repassed by cabs and costermongers, called at by the milkman, numbered by the vestryman, and marked by the solicitude of this last functionary to the extent exactly of an unimpressive street-lamp placed straight, or rather in fact placed considerably crooked, before the door. The street-lamp was a disfavour to the dark backward into which Ralph loved to look, and yet he was perhaps a little glad of its presence on the two or three occasions just mentioned—occasions of his patrolling the opposite side in
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