end it dignity; and the long, silent library
displayed row upon row of the masters, appropriately clad in morocco or
calf,--Smollett, Macaulay, Gibbon, Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Dickens,
Irving and Thackeray, as though each had striven for a tablet here. Art
had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on these walls; and
even the Church, on that first Sunday of my visit, forgot the blood of
her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche in the setting.
The clergyman, at one of the dinner parties, gravely asked a blessing as
upon an Institution that included and absorbed all other institutions in
its being....

The note of that house was a tempered gaiety. Guests arrived from New
York, spent the night and departed again without disturbing the even
tenor of its ways. Unobtrusive servants ministered to their wants,--and
to mine....

Conybear was there, and two classmates from Boston, and we were treated
with the amiable tolerance accorded to college youths and intimates of
the son of the house. One night there was a dance in our honour. Nor
have I forgotten Jerry's sister, Nathalie, whom I had met at Class Days,
a slim and willowy, exotic young lady of the Botticelli type, with
a crown of burnished hair, yet more suggestive of a hothouse than of
spring. She spoke English with a French accent. Capricious, impulsive,
she captured my interest because she put a high value on her favour;
she drove me over the hills, informing me at length that I was
sympathique--different from the rest; in short, she emphasized and
intensified what I may call the Weathersfield environment, stirred up in
me new and vague aspirations that troubled yet excited me.

Then there was Mrs. Kyme, a pretty, light-hearted lady, still young,
who seemed to have no intention of growing older, who romped and played
songs for us on the piano. The daughter of an old but now impecunious
Westchester family, she had been born to adorn the position she held,
she was adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys it
offered. From her, rather than from her husband, both of the children
seemed to have inherited. I used to watch Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat
at the end of the dinner-table, dark, preoccupied, taciturn, symbolical
of a wealth new to my experience, and which had about it a certain
fabulous quality. It toiled not, neither did it spin, but grew as if by
magic, day and night, until the very conception of it was overpowering.
Wha