ase, for what I may claim--perhaps too idly--on
behalf of my backward reach.

It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw
the "natural" so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or
comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was
because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so
little there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to
define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent
assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by
their effects--observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so
been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete
inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order
to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had
inimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our young
contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the
disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively
speaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at home
hadn't been; yet we were also to note--so far as we may be conceived as
so precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible
observers--that, the awareness in question remaining at the best
imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of
the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder
and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but _feebly_
sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and
unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and
loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't
make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or at least not worse
bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely never
have been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, their
amiability. I should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite
examples--save that in doing so I should lose sight of my point; which
is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and,
frankly, I claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which
we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, as
extraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part so
simple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of the
quantity of our inward life--ou