and fond analyst with fifty
other matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order--if
the American scene might indeed have been said at that time to be
positively ordered. Wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so out
of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the
natural?--and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless
kindred. It was shining to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht--though I
was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn--but the deck must
have been more used for the "German" than for other manoeuvres, often
doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the eldest of the many
light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me still
being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero,
"Bob" James to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion
on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent
from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow
orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant
skeleton.

It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks
that I see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally so
formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little
occasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious and
legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes
replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so
much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling
increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but
into which one was later on to read strange pages--to some of which I
may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have
dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the
bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated out
into the region of Washington Place. It is round that general centre
that my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster--as
if it had been, for the circle in which I seem justified in pretending
to have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did the
stretch of Broadway down to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the New
York Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (the
two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted
and demolished age, the brown Metropoli