t of some of us, especially doubtless
on my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than of
achieved or inspired assumption. We shivered unclad and impatient both
as to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for
breeches; we were supposed to make our dresses no less than to create
our characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short.
I remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a
"motive," producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that I
could stare at across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so that my
vision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming toward
me, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb
and with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and more
assured public. There were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, who
glimmer before me seated at the open folding-doors of ancient parlours,
but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more or
less squashed into the wing but never coming on. Who were the copious
Hunts?--whose ample house, on the north side, toward Seventh Avenue,
still stands, next or near that of the De Peysters, so that I perhaps
confound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blond
Beekman, or "Beek," of the latter race, not less than to the robust
George and the stout, the very stout, Henry of the former, whom I see
bounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a _pas seul_,
clad in a garment of "Turkey red" fashioned by his own hands and giving
way at the seams, to a complete absence of _dessous_, under the strain
of too fine a figure: this too though I make out in those connections,
that is in the twilight of Hunt and De Peyster garrets, our command of a
comparative welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the surmise
that Henry indeed had contours.

I recover, further, some sense of the high places of the Van Winkles,
but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the
proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear,
when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits
of young improvisation. Wonderful must it clearly have been still to fed
amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of _milieux_ and, as
they used to say, of atmospheres. This was a word of those
days--atmospheres were a thing to recognise and cultivate, for people
really wan