't make a scene--I _insist_ on your not making a scene!" That was all
the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less
epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had
never heard--it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should
say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed
freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these
intensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense
illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a
long time of course before I began to distinguish between those within
our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a
different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of
mind; just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparently
deficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a
scene _was_ then proceeded to--and I have lost all count of what
immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung
open; the passage, gathering up _all_ the elements of the troubled time,
had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware
with it of a rich accession of possibilities.

XIV

It must have been after the Sing-Sing episode that Gussy came to us, in
New York, for Sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than round
the corner--his foreign Institution flourishing, I seem to remember, in
West Tenth Street or wherever--and yet as floated by exotic airs and
with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him. He was being
educated largely with Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days more
than half the little flock of the foreign Institutions in general; over
whom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them,
were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special sense of them was
moreover by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but also
steeped in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing us queer echoes
of the tongues. I remember being deputed by my mother to go and converse
with her, on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment of
Madame Reichhardt (pronounced, a la francaise, Rechard,) where I felt
that I had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of "Europe"; it
being impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy,
with a laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to know
again, that Fr