He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfathers, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didnt chatter. She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. And then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here. It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasnt what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words, You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?
Well, with such a home! But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an i, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didnt rattle. How could any oneof any witinsist on any one elses wanting to live in New York?
Oh, he said, I might have lived here (since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then everything would have been different enoughand, I dare say, funny enough. But thats another matter. And then the beauty of itI mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a dealis just in the total absence of a reason. Dont you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it would have to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here but of dollars. Let us therefore have none whatevernot the ghost of one.
They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. Are you very sure the ghost of one doesnt, much rather, serve?
He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a grin: Oh ghostsof course the place must swarm with them! I should be ashamed of it if it didnt. Poor Mrs. Muldoons right, and its why I havent asked her to do more than look in.