“Oh, I was applying that opprobrious epithet--!” He didn’t finish, though he meant he had applied it to himself. He had got up from his seat; he turned about and, taking in, as his eyes also roamed, several objects in the room, serene and sturdy, not a bit cheap-looking, little old New York objects of ‘68, he made, with an inner art, as if to recognise them--made so, that is, for himself; had quite the sense for the moment of asking them, of imploring them, to recognise _him_, to be for him things of his own past. Which they truly were, he could have the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but spectrally faded, hadn’t in every particular, frames and balloon skirts and false “property” balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all, the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual imminent ache of one’s protective scowl, one would verily but have to let the scowl stiffen, or to take up seriously the question of blue goggles, during what might remain of life. V What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table 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 litde 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 wofully 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.”