of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or
less aesthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or
household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise
or ouvriere to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted
cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is to
say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and
harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found
them anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though I
must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare.

XXV

That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own
with W. J. in especial; at the same time that I have somehow the sense
of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanter
confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and
composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed--for
all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that there
was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem to
conceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from the
gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it,
fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation
to something nobly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us,
yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysees to the river,
and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Rue
de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent
even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself,
to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the
finest, which _could_ only mean the most Parisian, adventure. The
further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the
long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in
especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with
plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted
the long, black Rue de Seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ an
intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed
vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message,
expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might have
been "Art, art, art, don't you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what