Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/68

 regard it as a source of income. The reason was simply that the language of advertisement, the inimitable catchpenny flourish, depressed him by the perfection of its missing of the whole point. The whole point, that of the exceptional eligibility they panted to express in their terms, was the ineffable genius itself of the place, which while he kept indirectly raking it, grew upon him day by day. He couldn't go so far as to tell anyone that he had never seen anything so old—so old at once and so elaborate—as a structure dating only from the earlier years of the previous century. He couldn't decently cry it on the housetops that he had never yet so wetted his lips at the founts of romance. It was indeed without doubt, as he reflected, in favour of one's not finding people laugh in one's face that he happened to be in general little addicted to crying from the housetops.

Just these high considerations were in all probability the influence most active in his attitude toward the only approach to an adverse interest with which he was to perceive himself confronted. It had been at their first interview made known to him by his kinsman's main representative that the house stood, for the time, subject to a short lease—a lease for the "season" given by its late proprietor, apparently in one of his rare fits of response to the economic motive, the previous year; which arrangement constituted in fact but the renewal of an understanding arrived at, on more than 54