I shall never forget the impressions of that evening, nor the way, in particular, the immediate¹ effect of some of them was to merge² the light of my extravagant³ perceptions in a glamour⁴ much more diffused⁵. I remember feeling seriously warned, while dinner lasted, not to yield further to my idle habit of reading into mere⁶ human things an interest so much deeper than mere human things were in general prepared to supply. This especial hour, at Newmarch, had always a splendour that asked little of interpretation⁷, that even carried itself, with an amiable⁸ arrogance⁹, as indifferent to what the imagination could do for it. I think the imagination, in those halls of art and fortune, was almost inevitably¹⁰ accounted a poor matter; the whole place and its participants abounded¹¹ so in pleasantness and picture, in all the felicities, for every sense, taken for granted there by the very basis of life, that even the sense most finely poetic¹², aspiring¹³ to extract the moral, could scarce have helped feeling itself treated to something of the snub that affects — when it does affect — the uninvited reporter in whose face a door is closed. I said to myself during dinner that these were scenes in which a transcendent intelligence had after all no application, and that, in short, any

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