on the other side of the sea. To be so
disconnected, for the time, and in the most insidious manner, was above
all what I had come out for, and every appearance that might help it was
to be artfully and gratefully cultivated. I recollect well how many of
these combined as I sat at quite punctual fried sole and marmalade in
the comparatively disengaged sitting-room of the second floor--the
occupancy of the first has remained vague to me; disengaged from the
mantle of gloom the folds of which draped most heavily the feet of the
house, as it were, and thereby promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk
favourable to mural decoration consisting mainly of framed and glazed
"coloured" excisions from Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London
News that had been at their hour quite modern miracles. Was it for that
matter into a sudden splendour of the modern that I ascendingly emerged
under the hospitality of my kind fellow-tenant, or was it rather into
the fine classicism of a bygone age, as literature and the arts had
handed down that memory? Such were the questions whisked at every turn
under my nose and reducing me by their obscure charm but to bewildered
brooding, I fear, when I should have been myself, to repay these
attentions, quite forward and informing and affirmative.

There were eminent gentlemen, as I was sure they could only be, to
"meet" and, alas, awfully to interrogate me--for vivid has remained to
me, as the best of my bewilderment, the strangeness of finding that I
could be of interest to _them_: not indeed to call it rather the proved
humiliation of my impotence. My identity for myself was _all_ in my
sensibility to their own exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a
personal show; which made it as inconvenient as it was queer that I
should be treated as a specimen and have in the most unexpected manner
to prove that I was a good one. I knew myself the very worst
conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent
reason for my being so required more presence of mind than I could in
the least muster--the consequence of which failure had to be for me, I
fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance
of the air of imbecility. There were, it appeared, things of interest
taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd manner, to come
to England to learn it: I had had over there on the ground itself no
conception of any such matter--nothing of the smallest inter