discretion thoroughly vivid. These
attributes had with them all, for the eye, however, a range too great
for me to follow, since, as their professional undress was a turn-out
positively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsibly
public, or altogether festal, array played through the varied essentials
of fluted coif and folded kerchief and sober skirt and tense, dark,
displayed stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of long
gold ear-drop or solid short-hung pectoral cross, with a respect for
the rigour of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect.

I owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense of
innumerable unaccompanied walks--at the reason of which luxury of
freedom I have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep and
low-browed and brightly-daubed _ruelles_ of the fishing-town and either
across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; this
latter the site of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp of
invasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that
enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I could
ask for. Or I was as free for the _haute ville_ and the ramparts and the
scattered, battered benches of reverie--if I may so honour my use of
them; they kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the so
anciently odd and mainly contracted houses over which the stiff citadel
and the ghost of Catherine de Medicis, who had dismally sojourned in it,
struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must have
witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten Campaigner's passage in respect to
her cold beef. Far from extinct for me is my small question of those
hours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what human
life might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the last
acceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so absolutely
appointed and obliged did I feel to make out, so far as I could, what,
in so significant a world, they on their part _represented_. I think the
force mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time--as I see it can
only show for--was this lively felt need that everything should
represent something more than what immediately and all too blankly met
the eye; I seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere and,
though of course only without outward signs that might have betrayed my
fatuity, and insistently, quite yearningly applied it.