It had been offered, he remembered, at a
price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a
Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise,
all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed--
had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been
the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase
of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest;
but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of
association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the
picture he WOULD have bought--the particular production that had
made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was
quite aware that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have
a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing that the
wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the
maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street.
It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture
resolved back into its elements--to assist at the restoration to
nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the
background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured sanctum,
the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the
willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.
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