for as it was almost always by the
personal amenity, the practice of all sorts of pleasantness; if it kept
the gods themselves for the time in good-humour, one was willing enough,
or at least I was, to be on the side of the gods. Unmistakable too, as I
seem to recover it, was the positive interest of watching and noting,
roundabout one, for the turn, or rather for the blest continuity, of
their benevolence: such an appeal proceeded, in this, that and the
other particular case, from the fool's paradise really rounded and
preserved, before one's eyes, for those who were so good as to animate
it. There was always the question of how long they would be left to, and
the growth of one's fine suspense, not to say one's frank little
gratitude, as the miracle repeated itself.

All of which, I admit, dresses in many reflections the small
circumstance that Milford Cottage, with its innumerable red candles and
candle-shades, had affected me as the most embowered retreat for social
innocence that it was possible to conceive, and as absolutely settling
the question of whether the practice of pleasantness mightn't quite
ideally pay for the fantastic protectedness. The red candles in the red
shades have remained with me, inexplicably, as a vivid note of this
pitch, shedding their rosy light, with the autumn gale, the averted
reality, all shut out, upon such felicities of feminine helplessness as
I couldn't have prefigured in advance and as exemplified, for further
gathering in, the possibilities of the old tone. Nowhere had the
evening curtains seemed so drawn, nowhere the copious service so soft,
nowhere the second volume of the new novel, "half-uncut," so close to
one's hand, nowhere the exquisite head and incomparable brush of the
domesticated collie such an attestation of _that_ standard at least,
nowhere the harmonies of accident--of intention was more than one could
say--so incapable of a wrong deflection. That society would lack the
highest finish without some such distributed clusters of the thoroughly
gentle, the mildly presumptuous and the inveterately mistaken, was
brought home to me there, in fine, to a tune with which I had no
quarrel, perverse enough as I had been from an early time to know but
the impulse to egg on society to the fullest discharge of any material
stirring within its breast and not making for cruelty or brutality, mere
baseness or mere stupidity, that would fall into a picture or a scene.
The quality of