e luckless
together, and the combination was as strange as the disaster was
sweeping; and the daughter and sister, amplest of the "natural," easiest
of the idle, who lived on to dress their memory with every thread and
patch of her own perfect temper and then confirm the tradition, after
all, by too early and woeful an end.

If it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we might
well have invoked the educational "relief" I just spoke of, I should
doubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsically
of the poorest, and indeed make the point once for all that I should be
taken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through the
medium of rare inaptitudes. I can only have been inapt, I make out, to
have retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware of
most of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. There was
interest always, certainly--but it strikes me to-day as interest in
everything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question at
all, and in nothing that _was_ so respectably involved and accredited.
Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories;
but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered
"spirits," recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't have
had, through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success; without
which, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived and
wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but a
general lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) which
I clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, I
conceive, was that I imagined things--and as if quite on system--wholly
other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual
ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting
me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of
direct participation, at all. _There_ presumably was the interest--in
the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an
irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and
especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and
kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so
many wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as I can
recollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of
fate, playmates, intimates, mer