as all New England--so far at least as New England wasn't
Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best Boston"
families. Such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not
the value, of early impressions.

And yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of the
Norcoms, who had lately arrived _en masse_ from Louisville and had
improvised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house of our row--the
one to be occupied so differently, after their strange and precipitate
flight, as I dimly make out, by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; those
who presently, if I mistake not, moved out to Bloomingdale, if they were
not already in part established there. Next us westward were the Ogdens,
three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and general
amenity; then came the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and a
brother--he much the most serious and judicious, as well as the most
educated, of our friends; and so at last the Norcoms, during their brief
but concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I recall
it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were provided by their
presence with as happy a foil as we could have wished to the plainness
and dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all their own and was
also embodied in three brothers, Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages
would have corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, Charley and
Freddy if these latter hadn't, in their way, as I have hinted, defied
any close notation. Elder sons--there were to my recollection no
daughters--moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably
"Stiffy," eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as
sublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in use
among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion
of the _nuance_, the dandy, the dude, the masher. (Divided I was, I
recall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, "Well,
Stiffy--!" as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment.) The
higher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came from the large, the
lavish, ease of their hospitality; whereas our intercourse with the
Wards was mainly in the street or at most the "yard"--and it was a
wonder how intimacy _could_ to that degree consort with publicity. A
glazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and to
the rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open,
e