IV

In the street again, as he resumed his walk, he saw how perfectly it

would _have_ to suit him and how he probably for a long time wouldn’t

be suited otherwise. Between them and that time, however, what mightn’t,

for him, poor devil, on his new basis, have happened? She wasn’t at any

rate within any calculable period going to care so much for anything

as for the so quaintly droll terms in which her rearrangement with her

husband--thanks to that gentleman’s inimitable fatuity--would have to

be made. This was what it was to own, exactly, her special grace--the

brightest gaiety in the finest sensibility; _such_ a display of which

combination, Mark felt as he went (if he could but have done it still

more justice) she must have regaled him with! That exquisite last flush

of her fadedness could only remain with him; yet while he presently

stopped at a street-corner in a district redeemed from desolation but by

the passage just then of a choked trolley-car that howled, as he paused

for it, beneath the weight of its human accretions, he seemed to know

the inward “sinking” that had been determined in a hungry man by some

extravagant sight of the preparation of somebody else’s dinner. Florence

Ash was dining, so to speak, off the feast of appreciation, appreciation

of what she had to “tell” him, that he had left her seated at; and

she was welcome, assuredly--welcome, welcome, welcome, he musingly, he

wistfully, and yet at the same time a trifle mechanically, repeated,

stayed as he was a moment longer by the suffering shriek of another

public vehicle and a sudden odd automatic return of his mind to the

pretty girl, the flower of Mrs. Folliott’s crowd, who had spoken to

him of Newton Winch. It was extraordinarily as if, on the instant, she

reminded him, from across the town, that she had offered him dinner: it

was really quite strangely, while he stood there, as if she had told

him where he could go and get it. With which, none the less, it was

apparently where he wouldn’t find her--and what was there, after all, of

nutritive in the image of Newton Winch? He made up his mind in a moment

that it owed that property, which the pretty girl had somehow made

imputable, to the fact of its simply being just then the one image of

anything known to him that the terrible place had to offer. Nothing,

he a minute later reflected, could have been so “rum” as that, sick and

sore, of a bleak New York eventide, he should have had nowhere to turn

if not to the said Fiftieth Street.

That was the direction he accordingly took, for when he found the number

given him by the same remarkable agent of fate also present to his

memory he recognised the direct intervention of Providence and how it

absolutely required a miracle to explain his so precipitately embracing

this loosest of connections. The miracle indeed soon grew clearer:

Providence had, on some obscure system, chosen this very ridiculous hour

to save him from cultivation of the sin of selfishness, the obsession

of egotism, and was breaking him to its will by constantly directing his

attention to the claims of others. Who could say what at that critical

moment mightn’t have become of Mrs. Folliott (otherwise too then so

sadly embroiled!) if she hadn’t been enabled to air to him her grievance

and her rage?--just as who could deny that it must have done Florence

Ash a world of good to have put her thoughts about Bob in order by the

aid of a person to whom the vision of Bob in the light of those thoughts

(or in other words to whom _her_ vision of Bob and nothing else) would

mean so delightfully much? It was on the same general lines that poor

Newton Winch, bereft, alone, ill, perhaps dying, and with the drawback

of a not very sympathetic personality--as Mark remembered it at

least--to contend against in almost any conceivable appeal to human

furtherance, it was on these lines, very much, that the luckless case in

Fiftieth Street was offered him as a source of salutary discipline. The

moment for such a lesson might strike him as strange, in view of the

quite special and independent opportunity for exercise that his spirit

had during the last three days enjoyed there in his hotel bedroom; but

evidently his languor of charity needed some admonition finer than

any it might trust to chance for, and by the time he at last, Winch’s

residence recognised, was duly elevated to his level and had pressed

the electric button at his door, he felt himself acting indeed as under

stimulus of a sharp poke in the side.

V

Within the apartment to which he had been admitted, moreover, the fine

intelligence we have imputed to him was in the course of three minutes

confirmed; since it took him no longer than that to say to himself,

facing his old acquaintance, that he had never seen any one so improved.

The place, which had the semblance of a high studio light as well as a

general air of other profusions and amplitudes, might have put him off

a little by its several rather glaringly false accents, those of

contemporary domestic “art” striking a little wild. The scene was

smaller, but the rich confused complexion of the Pocahontas, showing

through Du Barry paint and patches, might have set the example--which

had been followed with the costliest candour--so that, clearly, Winch

was in these days rich, as most people in New York seemed rich; as, in

spite of Bob’s depredations, Florence Ash was, as even Mrs. Folliott was

in spite of Phil Bloodgood’s, as even Phil Bloodgood himself must have

been for reasons too obvious; as in fine every one had a secret for

being, or for feeling, or for looking, every one at least but Mark

Monteith.

These facts were as nothing, however, in presence of his quick and

strong impression that his pale, nervous, smiling, clean-shaven host

had undergone since their last meeting some extraordinary process of

refinement. He had been ill, unmistakably, and the effects of a plunge

into plain clean living, where any fineness had remained, were often

startling, sometimes almost charming. But independently of this, and for

a much longer time, some principle of intelligence, some art of life,

would discernibly have worked in him. Remembered from college years and

from those two or three luckless and faithless ones of the Law School

as constitutionally common, as consistently and thereby doubtless even

rather powerfully coarse, clever only for uncouth and questionable

things, he yet presented himself now as if he had suddenly and

mysteriously been educated. There was a charm in his wide, “drawn,”

convalescent smile, in the way his fine fingers--had he anything like

fine fingers of old?--played, and just fidgeted, over the prompt and

perhaps a trifle incoherent offer of cigars, cordials, ashtrays,

over the question of his visitor’s hat, stick, fur coat, general best

accommodation and ease; and how the deuce, accordingly, had charm, for

coming out so on top, Mark wondered, “squared” the other old elements?

For the short interval so to have dealt with him what force had it

turned on, what patented process, of the portentous New York order

in which there were so many, had it skilfully applied? Were these the

things New York did when you just gave her all her head, and that he

himself then had perhaps too complacently missed? Strange almost to the

point of putting him positively off at first--quite as an exhibition of

the uncanny--this sense of Newton’s having all the while neither missed

nor muffed anything, and having, as with an eye to the _coup de théâtre_

to come, lowered one’s expectations, at the start, to that abject pitch.

It might have been taken verily for an act of bad faith--really for

such a rare stroke of subtlety as could scarce have been achieved by a

straight or natural aim.

So much as this at least came and went in Monteith’s agitated mind; the

oddest intensity of apprehension, admiration, mystification, which the

high north-light of the March afternoon and the quite splendidly

vulgar appeal of fifty overdone decorative effects somehow fostered and

sharpened. Everything had already gone, however, the next moment,

for wasn’t the man he had come so much too intelligently himself to

patronise absolutely bowling him over with the extraordinary speech:

“See here, you know--you must be ill, or have had a bad shock, or some

beastly upset: are you very sure you ought to have come out?” Yes, he

after an instant believed his ears; coarse common Newton Winch, whom

he had called on because he could, as a gentleman, after all afford to,

coarse common Newton Winch, who had had troubles and been epidemically

poisoned, lamentably sick, who bore in his face and in the very tension,

quite exactly the “charm,” of his manner, the traces of his late ordeal,

and, for that matter, of scarce completed gallant emergence--this

astonishing ex-comrade was simply writing himself at a stroke (into our

friend’s excited imagination at all events) the most distinguished of

men. Oh, _he_ was going to be interesting, if Florence Ash had been

going to be; but Mark felt how, under the law of a lively present

difference, that would be as an effect of one’s having one’s self

thoroughly rallied. He knew within the minute that the tears stood in

his eyes; he stared through them at his friend with a sharp “Why, how do

you know? How _can_ you?” To which he added before Winch could speak: “I

met your charming sister-in-law a couple of hours since--at luncheon, at

the Pocahontas; and heard from her that you were badly laid up and had

spoken of me. So I came to minister to you.”

The object of this design hovered there again, considerably restless,

shifting from foot to foot, changing his place, beginning and giving up

motions, striking matches for a fresh cigarette, offering them again,

redundantly, to his guest and then not lighting himself--but all the

while with the smile of another creature than the creature known to

Mark; all the while with the history of something that had happened to

him ever so handsomely shining out. Mark was conscious within himself

from this time on of two quite distinct processes of notation--that

of his practically instant surrender to the consequences of the act of

perception in his host of which the two women trained suppos-ably in the

art of pleasing had been altogether incapable; and that of some other

condition on Newton’s part that left his own poor power of divination

nothing less than shamed. This last was signally the case on the

former’s saying, ever so responsively, almost radiantly, in answer to

his account of how he happened to come: “Oh then it’s very interesting!”

_That_ was the astonishing note, after what he had been through: neither

Mrs. Folliott nor Florence Ash had so much as hinted or breathed to him

that _he_ might have incurred that praise. No wonder therefore he was

now taken--with this fresh party’s instant suspicion and imputation of

it; though it was indeed for some minutes next as if each tried to see

which could accuse the other of the greater miracle of penetration. Mark

was so struck, in a word, with the extraordinarily straight guess Winch

had had there in reserve for him that, other quick impressions helping,

there was nothing for him but to bring out, himself: “There must be,

my dear man, something rather wonderful the matter with you!” The quite

more intensely and more irresistibly drawn grin, the quite unmistakably

deeper consciousness in the dark, wide eye, that accompanied the not

quite immediate answer to which remark he was afterward to remember.

“How do you know that--or why do you think it?” “Because there _must_

be--for you to see! I shouldn’t have expected it.”

“Then you take me for a damned fool?” laughed wonderful Newton Winch.