, and from that time on we conversed and
consorted, though with lapses and disparities; I being on the whole,
during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really
fortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as it
were, to the view of W. J., and the other, perhaps the more immediately
sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. Of this I shall have
more to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker of
him is to know again something of the sense that I attached all along
our boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse,
his genius (as I have used the word) for making friends. It was the only
genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing
the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by
the very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. For I had in
a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geniality
was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for
himself, so to speak, than for other friends--of whom indeed we, his own
adjuncts, were easily first--so far at least as he discriminated. At
night all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all his
acquaintance were his family. The trail of his sociability was over us
all alike--though it here concerns me but to the effect, as I recover
it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is
called taking life. I must have already at the Campagne Gerebsoff begun
to see him take it with all his directness--begun in fact to be a trifle
tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, we
are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all;
reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interest
to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. There was
a small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this operation of the
contrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as if
Wilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter for
my own. That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder
brother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Chatelaine,
then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on my
complete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable _sorties_
thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than I
recall sociable afternoo