n visits to the establishment on the part of the
rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in
the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in
these pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention. Of this
also more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of Wilky's
contribution to my rich current consciousness--the consciousness fairly
_made_ rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours
when I was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost
haunted interior.

Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas
planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so
spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before
lived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth,
depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my
waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt
obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often
below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed.
That was the sense of it--the _character_, in the whole place, pressed
upon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis--which
is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such
material conditions as I _had_ known could have had no depth at all. My
depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight,
for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the
rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there
softly to echo in--mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous,
personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much
encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and
half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's
experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever,
enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, _of_
personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I really
believe I was already aware--that one way of taking life was to go in
for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the
other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense
and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a
circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both
ways--that, I