He closed the one under his
hand.
As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more
indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant. He had retired further
and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of
harmony. Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging. It was as
if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in
a cast--a production, however, less than grand--he had been conducted to
a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which
he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle. The
final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years
had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New
York. Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had
dictated the form and conditions of his living. When the situation of
his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible
locations--he could not endure a club--became prohibitive; when his once
adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere
sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his
own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing
halls of assembly--he had retreated to the traditional place of his
family.
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