screened, though not to any
revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant
object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo--I
recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only
because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning,
which faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl Street and really
justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: I think of
the same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series of
small steps from the base of the gable to the point. These images are
subject, I confess, to a soft confusion--which is somehow consecrated,
none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth,
some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven
bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street
cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage--I see it all as from
under trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as
steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still
more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. There lives
in it the aspect of the other house--the other and much smaller than my
grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which was
pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was
greyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little
from the street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a
relaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chain
weighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with the
high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) and
fan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself in
ravishment before the marble and the pink. There were other houses
too--one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles
with my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father,
conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were not
exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which I distinctly
remember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our
aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who,
predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in
long light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capital
sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the remembered
enhanceme