ter; a turn of our situation invested at
the time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again
half prompt me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that mark of
the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of
earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience
which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency,
of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss
school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned
stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further
critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes
and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to
the panoramic. It ministered, to begin with, through our very early
start for Lyons again in the October dawn--without Nadali or the
carriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow
and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the high
haughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only at
appointed and much dissevered places--to the effect, I recall, of its
vainly attempted arrest by our cousin Charlotte King, beforementioned,
whom I see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from some
rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien que
pour saluer ces dames," as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she
practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the
wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. The coach had not, in the
event, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and
flurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these
particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on,
making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. She dropped as
elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must
much have wished they could emulate her art. Save for this my view of
that migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of our
early morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, and our hunt
there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vain
till we had sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before that of an
Albany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after some
delay descended to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no
possibility, to his regret, of placing u