ude ease.
Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of an
order in which forms still counted it might scarce have occurred to one
that there had ever been any. It comes over me therefore that he
testified--and perhaps quite beautifully; I remember his voice and his
speech, which were not those of _that_ New York at all, and with the
echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have
picked such things up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled things;
from what finer civilisation therefore had they come down to him? To
brood on this the least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open up
vistas--out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest
of questions. Mayn't we accordingly have been, the rest of us, all
wrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right?
May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless
ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated?--so that if, as is
conceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to be
bland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the
laurel as well as a martyr without the crown. The light of which
possibility is, however, too fierce; I turn it off, I tear myself from
the view--noting further but the one fact in his history that, by my
glimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. The youthful Albert, I have
mentioned, was to resist successfully through those years that
solicitation of "Europe" our own response to which, both as a general
and a particular solution, kept breaking out in choral wails; but the
other house none the less nourished projects so earnest that they could
invoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. The other house
didn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour, of which
ours was on many grounds incapable. Only after years and when endless
things had happened--Albert having long before, in especial, quite taken
up his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game--did the great
adventure get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliest
illustrations of the irony of fate. What had most of all flushed through
the dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian,
of the dim little gentleman's early Wanderjahre, that experience of
distant lands and seas which would find an application none the less
lively for having had long to wait. It had had to wait in truth half