ench only was speakable on the premises. I sniffed it up
aromatically, the superior language, in passage and parlour--it took the
form of some strong savoury soup, an educational _potage Rechard_ that
must excellently have formed the taste: that was again, I felt as I came
away, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenile
form upon the world. This genial girl, like her brother, was in the
grand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such a
splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neither
she nor Gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "Bob" of
that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusive
presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparently
displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. _He_ seemed
exposed, for his pleasure--if pleasure it was!--and my wonder, to every
assault of experience; his very name took on, from these imputations, a
browner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later,
he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture," have gone the
hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad
vague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and died
prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception,
picturesquely. The headshakes were heavier and the sighs sharper for
another slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the most
hapless of those I have called the outstanding ones; he too, several
years older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he too
charmingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumbing to monstrous
early trouble after having "shown some talent" for music. The
ghostliness of these aesthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, is
the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off
twang of old chords; I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under
what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to
the Albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with what
queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. Quite
ineffably quaint and _falot_ this proposition of _that_ sort of resource
for the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above all
beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (ours
as the whole kinship's) from _the_ American resource of those days,
Albanian or other. That precious light was the light of "