ng, as I recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" at
the Clarendon Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient
corner of Fourth Avenue and--was it Eighteenth Street?--long ago ceased
to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe and
the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's
desire that his protege should find employment. The protector after a
little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small
full-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the
knob of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day be mentioned,
fell below its general possibilities; but I note the scene through which
I must duly have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen no one, least
of all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint"
before,) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation of
my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. And then
there are other connections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recover
the place itself as a featureless void--bleak and bare, with its
developments all to come, the hotel parlour of other New York days--but
vivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time at
operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. Those of
quiet Mr. Crowe held me spellbound--I was to circle so wistfully, as
from that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite of
these earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in the
least acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was ever
to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant
himself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the London years,
as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. Not
only by association was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if the
master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life
and sweetness and patience--shown, as after the long futility, seated
in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That was sad, one couldn't
but feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a
failure. He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what was
that when he was one of Thackeray's own successes?--in the minor line,
but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin
to Colonel Newcome.

VIII

I feel that at such a rate I remember