He was
incapable of giving an off-hand answer or opinion on the simplest
occasion, and his tone of high deliberation increased in proportion as
the subject was trivial or domestic. If his wife asked him at dinner if
the potatoes were good, he replied that they were strikingly fine (he
used to speak of the newspaper as "fine"--he applied this term to
objects the most dissimilar), and embarked on a parallel worthy of
Plutarch, in which he compared them with other specimens of the same
vegetable. He produced, or would have liked to produce, the impression
of looking above and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate,
of reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one all-absorbing
solicitude--the desire to get paragraphs put into the newspapers,
paragraphs of which he had hitherto been the subject, but of which he
was now to divide the glory with his daughter. The newspapers were his
world, the richest expression, in his eyes, of human life; and, for him,
if a diviner day was to come upon earth, it would be brought about by
copious advertisement in the daily prints. He looked with longing for
the moment when Verena should be advertised among the "personals," and
to his mind the supremely happy people were those (and there were a good
many of them) of whom there was some journalistic mention every day in
the year.
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