The Jolly Corner | Page 4

had lived and had died, in which the
holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few
social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated
then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two
brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his
hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so "good" - the jolly
corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and
consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with
an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents
which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been
depressingly low. He could live in "Europe," as he had been in the habit
of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all
the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its
long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high
advance had proved beautifully possible.
These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since
his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house
within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course
of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time
before, to overtures for this conversion - in which, now that it was
going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find
himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such
experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a
certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such
concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he
scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his
mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for
construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been

dormant in his own organism - where it might be said of them perhaps
that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid
autumn weather - the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible
place - he loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in
the least "minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar
and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle
materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and
challenge explanations and really "go into" figures.
It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it
amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her
perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better-off for it, as
HE was - and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew,
ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of
life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in
Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her
almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better
than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings
which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast
ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss- crossed lines and
figures - if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really
not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and
recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through
the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small
still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the
sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where
economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived
with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and
polished her silver; she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, when she
could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really
to "spirit," the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly,
as to that of the better time, that of THEIR common, their quite
far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the
street-cars when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for
as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted,
inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet,
with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to

say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble,
or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful
indifference with her precious reference, above all, to memories and
histories into