ning aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere
deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly
opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of
my young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own
age, and named in honour of her having been born in Paris, to the
influence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness and
brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, so
almost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice of
the air that she was "spoiled," and it made her in the highest degree
interesting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without being
in the least spoiled (I think we even rather missed it:) so that I knew
about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature--mainly,
no doubt, that of the nursery--in which they formed, quite by
themselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, I
prized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition at
work. This chance was given me, it was clear--though I risk in my record
of it a final anticlimax--by a remark from my uncle Augustus to his
daughter: seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dim
dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go to
bed--expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was to
strike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members of
the family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect of
making judgment very personal without quite making authority so.
Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones;
they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a
peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked but in
the air, I feel sure, that Marie should seek her couch--a truth by the
dark wing of which I ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemed
therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained of
their effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised by
my cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father;
promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion
across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an
appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from
that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear;
don