, of
forging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceable
grounds warrant. One can but fall back, none the less, on the particular
_un_traceability of grounds--when it comes to that: cases abound so in
which, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to be
identified. I contend for nothing moreover but the lively interest of
the view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental history
after the fact. Of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of the
mind _before_--before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and while
still muffled in theories and presumptions (purple and fine linen, and
as such highly becoming though these be) of what shall prove best for
it.

Which doubtless too numerous remarks have been determined by my sense of
the tenuity of some of my clues: I had begun to count our wavering steps
from so very far back, and with a lively disposition, I confess, not to
miss even the vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate the
vagueness that quite _had_ to attend a great number in presence of the
fact that our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably more
than for anything else, anything at all that might be or might become
ours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as profession
and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in our
mastery of _any_ art or craft. It was not certainly that the profession
of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that,
singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might have
struck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, that
or the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of his
dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other suchlike
heads, however, other examples will arise; for I see him now as fairly
afraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in the
harshness of practical precautions or impositions. The effect of his
attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential,
but in spite of this so socially and affectionally founded, could only
be to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making it
extraordinarily "paying." He had a theory that it would somehow or other
always be paying enough--and this much less by any poor conception of
our wants (for he delighted in our wants and so sympathetically and
sketchily and summarily wanted _for_ us) than by