even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundry
expressions of life or force, which I yet had no name for, represented
somehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same
thing) presence without type. All of which, I should add, didn't in the
least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as I
have noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions of
that winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but had
for its best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were too
much of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone's seeming to
know everything--to the effect, a little, that everything suffered by
it. There was a boy called Simpson my juxtaposition to whom I recall as
uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think,
quite immediately Irish--and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and
helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange
accomplishment--no single show of which but was accompanied in him by a
smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that
almost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had passed in that sadness
most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in
some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more
intelligible nearness of the time--it had brought me to the end of my
twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave
to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not
only myself but my instructors--which I infer I did from their so
intensely letting me alone--I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth
mainly the remembrance of _being_ consistently either ignored or
exquisitely considered (I know not which to call it;) even if without
the belief, which would explain it, that I passed for generally
"wanting" any more than for naturally odious. It was strange, at all
events--it could only have been--to be so stupid without being more
brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case and
a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could
have felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to be
morbidly curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no instance
whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably have
missed one of these more flattering shades of attention had I missed
attention at all; but I think I was never re