THE SENSE OF THE PAST
of white marble and black, each so old that the white was worn nearly to yellow and the black nearly to blue. He had never for an instant doubted of the virtue, the value he would have called it in his esoteric sense, of this particular spot; which had originally given him, on the instant, under his first flush, the measure of a possible experience. He had said to himself crudely and artlessly "It's Jacobean"—which it wasn't, even though he had thought but of the later James. The intensity of the inference and the charm of the mistake had marked withal his good faith; the memory of which was to remind him later on of how everything still to come was then latent in that plot of space, and of how everything that had, was accorded and attested by it. The door to-day had but once more to close with the slight heaviness that inevitably defeated discretion and the overpaid and dismissed hansom to be heard for a minute get again into empty motion on the other side of it, for Ralph to feel at ease about the lapsed influence he had come to start up. The influence was on this occasion not only all there—it was really there as it had been on no other. His friends in charge, effacing themselves and leaving him to roam, appeared literally to have provided the particular hush into which it would best step forth, and he liked to figure them as types of ancient servitude, quaint and knowing their place, properly awestruck by
62
