On what occasion, ever, had she appeared to find him wanting?
These things, the motives of such people, were obscure--a little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune.

He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife's countryman-which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole--or was it the South ?--than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow.

There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery.

The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs.
Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain.

He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness--but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous.