V

Summary

What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table389 that piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in his hand, only holding it now a little behind him. “You must have come back to stay—with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?”

“‘Beautiful’?” his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. “Oh, don't talk so—after Mrs. Worthingham’s! They’re wonderful, if you will: such things, such things! But one's own poor relics and odds and ends are one's own at least; and one has—yes—come back to them. They’re all I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was paying—!” Miss Rasch woefully added.

He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against him, was good to his palm. “Mrs. Worthingham's things? You think them beautiful?”

Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. “Why certainly prodigious, or whatever. Isn't that conceded?”

“No doubt every horror, at the pass we’ve come to, is conceded. That's just what I complain of.”

“Do you complain?”—she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn't have imagined such a thing.

“To me her things are awful. They’re the newest of the new.”

“Ah, but the old forms!”

“Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.”