The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: loosely and pleasantly, old relations - met indeed, so far as he
could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in
spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had
spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who
might have watched it, to edification, he was positively rather
liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success - and all
with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere
surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their
corks - just as his gestures of response were the extravagant
shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game
of OMBRES CHINOISES. He projected himself all day, in thought,
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