ents of a
rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short time
since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of
the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and
this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the
old long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well
while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without
doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and
force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony
in which they moved. That lives again to my considering eyes, and I
admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our cousin's guardian,
the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the
cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually _our_ only one, so far
as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went; and the three,
daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought up
together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strain
and the same nest. The cousin Helen of our young prospect was thus all
but the sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was
scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the
new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular,
for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her
strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of
better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements
of some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she
looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest
humour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the
important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, that
hang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who
have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify
them for places in great collections. I note with appreciation that she
was strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression both
that no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies for
the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies.
Her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her mere
local consistency, her fine old New York ignorance and rigour. Her
traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to