steeped as in some chemical bath; the effect was nowhere in particular, yet he constantly felt himself at the mercy of the cause. He knew his antenatal history, knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep causes well before him. What was his frank judgement of so much of its ugliness, he asked himself, but a part of the cultivation of humility? What was this so important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn’t do he must make something different. He perfectly recognised – always in his humility – that the material for the making had to be Mr Verver’s millions. There was nothing else for him on earth to make it with; he had tried before – had had to look about and see the truth. Humble as he was, at the same time he was not so humble as if he had known himself frivolous or stupid. He had an idea – which may amuse his historian – that when you were stupid enough to be mistaken about such a matter you did know it. Therefore he wasn’t mistaken – his future might be scientific. There was nothing in himself at all events to prevent it. He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition, which was in its turn too much the consequence, or at least the exhalation, of archives. He thought of these things – of his not being at all events futile, and of his absolute acceptance of the developments of the coming age – to redress the balance of his being so differently considered. The moments when he most winced were those at which he found himself believing that, really, futility would have been forgiven him. Even with it, in that absurd view, he would have been good enough. Such was the laxity, in the Ververs, of the romantic spirit. They didn’t, indeed, poor dears, know what, in that line – the line of futility – the real thing meant. He did – having seen it, having tried it, having taken its measure. This was a memory in fact simply to screen out – much as, just in front of him while he walked, the iron shutter of a shop, closing early to the stale summer day, rattled down at the turn of some crank. There was machinery again, just as the plate glass, all about him, was money, was power, the power of the rich peoples. Well, he was of them now, of the rich peoples; he was on their side – if it wasn’t rather the pleasanter way of putting it that they were on his.
Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his walk. It would have been ridiculous – such a moral from such a source – if it hadn’t all somehow fitted to the gravity of the hour, that gravity the oppression of which I began by recording. Another feature was the immediate nearness of the arrival of the contingent from home. He was to meet them at Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill,10 was not in a condition to travel; his sister and her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the most disponsible of ex-deputies and of relatives – a scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of Maggie’s plea for hymeneal reserve, were to accompany him to the altar. It was no great array, yet it was apparently to be a more numerous muster than any possible to the bride herself, she having no wealth of kinship to choose from and not making it up on the other hand by loose invitations. He had been interested in the girl’s attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it, giving him, as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the kind of discriminations she would in general be governed by – which were quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadn’t natural relations, she and her father, she had explained; so they wouldn’t try to supply the place by artificial, by