t uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. It
represented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seem to
me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the
approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of
her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for
gentlemen--gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau de Cologne
and the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever
remarkable Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from
Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel
couldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's
establishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. John
and Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, who
were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles,
made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the place
was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion--as to where
they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above
all as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis)
they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves;
and that their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow
inordinate: I might have been judging it in my innocence as their only
_consommation_. I refer to those sources, I say, the charm of the
scene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as it
regularly lapsed, dispose of _all_ mystifications. If I didn't
understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (that
was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and
collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other
did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who
didn't understand--save in so far as I understood _that_, which was a
kind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from uncles
so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at any
rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, its
light on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personal
note in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of the
hand-made fabric and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as a
value anywhere--by which I meant in the right corner of any social
picture, I afterwards said to myself--that re