arried people, into which, really, my
mother, as a participant, must have introduced me.

IV

It took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet the
elder--for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet another
consanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among
them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my
father's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, the first of these the
Robert aforesaid. Catherine James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, his
then quite recent and, as I remember her, animated and attractive bride,
whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping
"front" curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free
and happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that
ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. She was
distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of
the dance; that passion in which I think of the "good," the best, New
York society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away.
Her younger sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James--or more
inveterately Jim--Pendleton, of Virginia, followed close upon her heels,
literally speaking, and though emulating her in other respects too, was
to last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily the
while like the younger portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have much
hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly natural
way, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But I
am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved--as if
a social light would somehow stream from them--in my having been taken,
a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Emmet's "grown-up" assembly. Was it
that my mother really felt that to the scrap that I was other scraps
would perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something to
distinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declared
itself--such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual
ferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intense
of the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which it
bristles? All the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to
me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably,
but at the same time almost indescribably, _natural_; which fact
connects itself for the brooding painter