fectionate interest what
effect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps all
unfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I look back that it was
really to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keep
its really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words,
when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was to
pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been
the sole possible expression. For it was as of an altogether special
shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was
touchingly to linger with us--so that to myself, at present, with only
the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it
becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild
mortality is laid away. We used to have in the after-time, amid fresh
recognitions and reminders, the kindest "old New York" identifications
for it. The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not
conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was
conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and
so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was
the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having
borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousness
could be so preserved. They played about in it so happily and serenely
and sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished
and uninformed--only aware at the most that a good many people within
their horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many
_were_. What it was to be dissipated--that, however, was but in the most
limited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, under
pressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy.

Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense
somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being
surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred
circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after
meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all
but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I
anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent
that I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly
afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general
propositi