In Cornelia’s small and quite cynically modern flat--the house had a grotesque name, “The Gainsborough,” but at least wasn’t an awful boarding-house, as he had feared, and she could receive him quite honourably, which was so much to the good--he would have been ready to use at once to her the greatest freedom of friendly allusion: “Have you still your old ‘family interest’ in those two houses in Seventh Avenue?--one of which was next to a corner grocery, don’t you know? and was occupied as to its lower part by a candy-shop where the proportion of the stock of suspectedly stale popcorn to that of rarer and stickier joys betrayed perhaps a modest capital on the part of your father’s, your grandfather’s, or whoever’s tenant, but out of which I nevertheless remember once to have come as out of a bath of sweets, with my very garments, and even the separate hairs of my head, glued together. The other of the pair, a tobacconist’s, further down, had before it a wonderful huge Indian who thrust out wooden cigars at an indifferent world--you could buy candy cigars too, at the pop-corn shop, and I greatly preferred them to the wooden; I remember well how I used to gape in fascination at the Indian and wonder if the last of the Mohicans was like him; besides admiring so the resources of a family whose ‘property’ was in such forms. I haven’t been round there lately--we must go round together; but don’t tell me the forms have utterly perished!” It was after _that_ fashion he might easily have been moved, and with almost no transition, to break out to Cornelia--quite as if taking up some old talk, some old community of gossip, just where they had left it; even with the consciousness perhaps of overdoing a little, of putting at its maximum, for the present harmony, recovery, recapture (what should he call it?) the pitch and quantity of what the past had held for them.