He encouraged it when it appeared.
He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in order, as if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in his life before and he might close the portfolio with a snap.

It would open again, doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the Romans; it would even perhaps open with his dining to-night in Portland Place, where Mr.
Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius.

But what meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have said, was his sense of the immediate two or three hours.

He paused on corners, at crossings; there kept rising for him, in waves, that consciousness, sharp as to its source while vague as to its end, which I began by speaking of--the consciousness of an appeal to do something or other, before it was too late, for himself.

By any friend to whom he might have mentioned it the appeal could have been turned to frank derision.