n was the result of the
very air of home, so far as I most consciously inhaled it. This
represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all
the interest they were capable of yielding; but I had taken the twist,
had sipped the poison, as I say, and was to feel it to that end the most
salutary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient
order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate
features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since their
theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew
the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I simply grew
greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute
success in life. I never found myself deterred from this fond view,
which was implied in every question I asked, every answer I got, and
every plan I formed.

Those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if
success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of
some intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a claim to it. To
press my nose against the sources of the English smell, so different for
young bibliophiles from any American, was to adopt that sweetness as the
sign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but one
was in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. The
very names of places and things in the other world--the marked opposite
in most ways of that in which New York and Albany, Fort Hamilton and New
Brighton formed so fallacious a maximum--became to me values and secrets
and shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed as
ignorance determined, but I quite recall being ashamed to use them as
much as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I reconstruct (and
indeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last--that and our
final sordid school, W. J.'s and mine, in New York: the ancient order
_had_ somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were the
best within our compass and our means. Not further to anticipate, at all
events, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and the
illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. It
is only of what I took for felicity, however few the years and however
scant the scene, that I am pretending now to speak; though I shall have
strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our towny summers
with the quite s