The old man said this or that picture was of
this or that school, and vague lights of knowledge and senses of
difference that flattered Lemuel's intellectual vanity stole in upon
him. He began to feel that the things Mr. Corey had lived for were
the great and high objects of life.
He now perceived how far from really fine or fashionable anything at
the St. Albans had been, and that the simplicity of Miss Vane's
little house, which the splendour of the hotel had eclipsed in his
crude fancy, was much more in harmony with the richness of Mr.
Corey's. He oriented himself anew, and got another view of the world
which he had dropped into. Occasionally he had glimpses of people
who came to see the Coreys, and it puzzled him that this family,
which he knew so kind and good, took with others the tone hard and
even cynical which seemed the prevailing tone of society; when their
acquaintances went away they dropped back, as if with relief, into
their sincere and amiable fashions of speech. Lemuel asked himself
if every one in the world was playing a part; it did not seem to him
that Miss Carver had been; she was always the same, and always
herself. To be one's-self appeared to him the best thing in the
world, and he longed for it the more as he felt that he too was
insensibly beginning to play a part. Being so much in this beautiful
and luxurious house, where every one was so well dressed and well
mannered, and well kept in body and mind, and passing from his
amazement at all its appointments into the habit of its comfortable
beauty, he forgot more and more the humility and the humiliations of
his past.
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