tibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the _vitrines_, by the
cousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had
so much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me I must have
quite confessed my inability to say--and must, I gather, by the same
stroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy I
showed more poorly than girls. There was a difference meanwhile for such
puzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions melted
for me there into the single depth of envy--envy of the equal, the
beatific command of the evening hour, in the _regime_ of Honorine's
young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier
even after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much
as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of La Dame
aux Camelias. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness
of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything"
might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly
have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's
triumphant idyll--now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous
classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters,
Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely,
at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous
mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is
all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping
nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and
arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our
peculiar young culture and candour!

All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more
leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and
her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked.
The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a
later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first
winter, mainly from a _petit hotel_ somewhere "on the other side," as
we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysees; a region
at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as
a chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hotels_ of archaic type
were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so
characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between