light. As one sat there one _understood_; one drew out the severe seance
not to stay the assault of precious conspiring truths, not to break the
current of in-rushing telltale suggestion. Every face was a documentary
scrap, half a dozen broken words to piece with half a dozen others, and
so on and on; every sound was strong, whether rich and fine or only
queer and coarse; everything in this order drew a positive sweetness
from never being--whatever else it was--gracelessly flat. The very
rudeness was ripe, the very commonness was conscious--that is not
related to mere other forms of the same, but to matters as different as
possible, into which it shaded off and off or up and up; the image in
fine was organic, rounded and complete, as definite as a Dutch picture
of low life hung on a museum wall. "Low" I say in respect to the life;
but that was the point for me, that whereas the smartness and newness
beyond the sea supposedly disavowed the low, they did so but thinly and
vainly, falling markedly short of the high; which the little boxed and
boiled Albany attained to some effect of, after a fashion of its own,
just by having its so thoroughly appreciable note-value in a scheme of
manners. It was imbedded, so to speak, in the scheme, and it borrowed
lights, it borrowed even glooms, from so much neighbouring distinction.
The places across the sea, as they to my then eyes faintly after-glowed,
had no impinging borders but those of the desert to borrow _from_. And
if it be asked of me whether all the while I insist, for demonstration
of the complacency with which I desire to revert, on not regretting the
disappearance of such too long surviving sordidries as those I have
evoked, I can but answer that blind emotion, in whichever sense
directed, has nothing to say to the question and that the sense of what
we just _could_ confidently live by at a given far-away hour is a simple
stout fact of relief.

Relief, again, I say, from the too enormous present accretions and
alternatives--which we witlessly thought so innumerable then, which we
artlessly found so much of the interest of _in_ an immeasurable
multiplicity and which I now feel myself thus grope for ghostly touch of
in the name, neither more nor less, of poetic justice. I wasn't
doubtless at the time so very sure, after all, of the comparative
felicity of our state, that of the rare _moment_ for the fond fancy--I
doubtless even a bit greedily missed certain quantities, not