ent to me as ever is
the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and of
our complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease--for I recall in
particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone--with
the thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the very
smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation
altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum
of a thousand possibilities. I consciously took them in, these last, and
must then, I think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps
I was ever to know--that of almost holding my breath in presence of
certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was as if in those hours
that precious fine art had been disclosed to me--scantly as the poor
place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote
it. We seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and I
must have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all by
this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the whole
succession of those summer days. The next application of it that stands
out for me, or the next that I make room for here, since I note after
all so much less than I remember, is the intensity of a fond
apprehension of Paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel
that hung, through the soft summer night, over the Rue de la Paix. I
hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister,
though I recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the
larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I
seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had but
just turned twelve!--and that now filled out its frame or case for me
from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been,
for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very
breath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of
preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of--though I
believe I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any
rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a
_modiste_ just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings,
as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried through
frank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine
strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the
e