abundance. One of
these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and
prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly--a
cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as
it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. The
daughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by the
legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the
Deux-Decembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from Gallipolis,
Ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is,
of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as the
most brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting the
Parisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and
more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace
with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our
innocent air. It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that
extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for
the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said.

Those, however, were later things--extensions of view hampered for the
present, as I have noted, by our mere London street-scenery, which had
much to build out for us. I see again that we but endlessly walked and
endlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own,
constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and we
even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones,
rude with a kind of mediaeval rudeness for which our clear New York
experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and
constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our
public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we
vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far as
we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range in
those days, but in our very plumage--putting our _ramage_ aside--our
wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, when
abroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes
of their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-foot
stare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for some
reason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. The
London people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of
type