little
wand. He flourished it modestly enough, ancient worthy of an immemorial
order that he was--old pensioned servant, of course, of a Cumberland (as
I believe) family, a kind, slim, celibate, informing and informed member
of which occupied his second floor apartments; a friend indeed whom I
had met on the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley's
Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring
hospitality in the Kensington quarter. Succumbing thus to my tangle of
memories, from which I discern no escape, I recognise further that if
the endlessly befriending Charles Nortons introduced me to Albert
Rutson, and Albert Rutson introduced me to his feudal retainer, so it
was in no small degree through the confidence borrowed from the latter's
interest in the decent appearance I should make, an interest of a
consistency not to have been prefigured by any at all like instance in
my past, that I so far maintained my dizzy balance as to be able to
ascend to the second floor under the thrill of sundry invitations to
breakfast. I dare say it is the invitations to breakfast that hold me at
this moment by their spell--so do they breathe to me across the age the
note of a London world that we have left far behind; in consequence of
which I the more yearningly steal back to it, as on sneaking tiptoe, and
shut myself up there without interference. It is embalmed in
disconnections, in differences, that I cultivate a free fancy for
pronouncing advantageous to it: sunk already was the shaft by which I
should descend into the years, and my inspiration is in touching as many
as possible of the points of the other tradition, retracing as many as
possible of the features of the old face, eventually to be blurred again
even before my own eyes, and with the materials for a portrait thereby
accessible but to those who were present up to the time of the change.

I don't pretend to date this change which still allows me to catch my
younger observation and submission at play on the far side of it; I make
it fall into the right perspective, however, I think, when I place it
where I began to shudder before a confidence, not to say an impudence,
of diminution in the aspects by which the British capital differed so
from those of all the foreign together as to present throughout the
straight contradiction to them. That straight contradiction, testifying
invaluably at every turn, had been from far back the thing, r