ery greatest that could possibly be
attached to anything in the world; I for my part occupied with those
marks of character in our pacing companion--his long, slightly equine
countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm,
and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusive
head, as if somehow through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that he
habitually wore and that, wound and re-wound in their successive stages,
made his neck very long without making it in the least thick and reached
their climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatest
art. I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a
little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there,
far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now so
convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the
great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary
projector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world of
dangers, with whom I was later on to make acquaintance? I put myself
the question, of scant importance though it may seem; but there is a
reflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. I catch myself in
the act of seeing poor anonymous "Dear," as cousin Helen confined
herself, her life long, to calling him, in the light of an image
arrested by the French genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. I
scarce know what it _doesn't_ suggest for the fact of sharpness, of
intensity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagination almost any
dance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so marked
by it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure.

That degree of finish was surely rare among us--rare at a time when the
charm of so much of the cousinship and the uncleship, the kinship
generally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with any
finish at all. They happened to be amiable, to be delightful; but--I
think I have already put the question--what would have become of us all
if they hadn't been? a question the shudder of which could never have
been suggested by the presence I am considering. He too was gentle and
bland, as it happened--and I indeed see it all as a world quite
unfavourable to arrogance or insolence or any hard and high assumption;
but the more I think of him (even at the risk of thinking too much) the
more I make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated cr