But to-day he looked at it as he came down, trying to see it, to take it in, so that, once safely photographed on his memory, it should never afterwards escape him. And at once he found, as Mattie had found with the furniture, that he could not see it. Instantly association was upon him, refusing to allow his mind to focus on shape or size. He could not decide whether the house were beautiful or ugly, dignified or insignificant, of this period or that. As he had said to Mattie of her household gear, it was no more possible to judge it than it was to judge a familiar face. He had, it is true, an impression of fine stone, of moulded windows and doors, a wide courtyard, pillars, steps, and soft-coloured, slated roofs. But always he found it impossible to see it as it would have looked unclad and without its background. Always his eye went to the creepers which he had tended upon it, to the shelter of the woods behind it, the run of the park before it, to the long lawns and the gravel sweep and the curving boundary of the river. And even those he could not see as another person would have seen them, for he had looked at them so long that it was only the spirit he saw, and never the bodily forms which contained and expressed that spirit.... Yet this place, grown so impalpable to him that he could not even focus it, had him closely welded to it. He knew vaguely that you could not separate him from it without hurting him, any more than you could strip the creepers from the walls without leaving a scar. House and land had grown impalpable to him because between him and them moved the pictures of his past, so that you could not sever him from them without damaging him, because what you would really be separating him from was his own life. There was a centralising power about the mansion of a big estate of which those who had never been connected with one could have no knowledge. It was like a huge buoy to which you were attached,--so safely attached that, no matter what came or went on the ocean outside, you, at least, could never slip away. Those outside must often feel a little lost, he had sometimes thought, shrinking from that possible isolation even in his mind. But, anchored to a place like the Hall, you had no fear of getting lost. Although you could not see it because you knew it so well, it was at all events a background against which you could see yourself,--as small, indeed, and comparatively unimportant, but still more or less plainly. Once broken away from that background, however, and out in the open,--in Canada, for instance,--it seemed highly probable that you would not be able to see yourself at all.