"Is the fact of your situation that you've seen a ghost?"
"Oh," Ralph raised his head high to say, "I decline to admit for a moment that he was that. He was much better than any ghost."
It seemed to make for the Ambassador a distinction that he desired to grasp. "'Better'?"
"Well, much more contrary to nature."
"I don't understand then," the Ambassador said, "why you don't rather call it worse. Isn't the impression strange in proportion as it's contrary to nature, and isn't it by the same token agitating or upsetting or appalling, for any relation with such a matter, in proportion as it's strange?" After which he went on while Ralph felt his considering look: "Do you really like such impressions?"
"I see I'm an impression to you—and of course an extraordinary one; but he wasn't one to me," Ralph pursued, "in any such sense as that—for the interest of our relation, as you justly term it, is so much more interesting, you see, than any with which, even at the best, I can hope to inspire you. He was a man as substantial for me as I am—or as I was!" Ralph pulled up a moment to smile—"for myself; and interesting most of all, I suppose, because so extraordinarily interested."
"Interested in you?" his host inquired as with the care to avoid alike too much or too little gravity.
"Well, yes—interested in me by his being so possessed of the kind of thing that interests us both. I've been ridden all my life, I think I should tell you"—for our young man thought it but fair to develop this—"by the desire to cultivate some better sense of the past than has mostly seemed sufficient even for those people who have gone in most for cultivating it, and who with most complacency," Ralph permitted himself to add, "have put forth their results. So you can fancy what a charm it was," he wound up, "to catch a person, and a beautifully intelligent one, in the very act of cultivating——"
The Ambassador was on his feet at this, with an effect of interruption, as by the very quickness of his apprehension. "His sense of the present!" he triumphantly smiled.
But his visitor's smile reduced that felicity. "His sense of the future, don't you see?—which had at last declined to let him rest, just as my corresponding expression had declined to let me. Only after his being worried," Ralph's scruple explained, "nearly a century longer."