s
were not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the
elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous;
if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was but
under much later information. What my childish vision was really most
possessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim
little gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of the
two big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the
deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" or
whatever, in strange far seas--according to the only legend connected
with him save that of his early presumption in having approached, such
as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having
approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, since
it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a
bride beyond his deserts.

XI

I am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to Albert, who at
times sociably condescended to my fewer years--I still appreciate the
man-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for the minute to have
left me, and I am attached but to the rich perspective in which "Uncle"
(for Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle) comes and goes; out of
the comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding brave
extensions, as I thought them, a covered piazza over which, in season,
Isabella grapes accessibly clustered and beyond which stretched,
further, a "yard" that was as an ample garden compared to ours at home;
I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms
are interlocked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with the
hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrust
inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward; I assist at his emergence,
where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what
used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of
the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into
Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably
or mercifully taking place there; and then I await his regular return,
preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocently
am to his discoveries or his comments. It is cousin Helen however who
preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance,
which is for the moment the v