The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (1.1894)

By Henry James 17

higher, between the watching faces and the envious sounds—away
up to the dai's and the throne. The article was a date ; he had
taken rank at a bound—waked up a national glory. A national
glory was needed, and it was an immense convenience he was there.
What all this meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a little faint
—it meant so much more than I could say " yea " to on the spot.
In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendouS' wave I
speak of had swept something away. It had knocked down, I
suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my
flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast and
bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would
come out a contemporary. That was what had happened—the
poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I feit as if
he had been overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back
to the city. A little more and he would have dipped down to
posterity and escaped.

IV

When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody,
for beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who,
save that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and
in whom at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary
enterprise.

"This is Mr. Morrow," said Paraday, looking, I thought,
rather white; " he wants to publish heaven knows what about
me."

I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself
had wanted. " Already ? " I exclaimed, with a sort of sense that
my friend had fled to me for protection.

The Yellow Book—Vol. I. B Mr. Morrow