ted them, gasped for them; which was why they took them, on
the whole, on easy terms, never exposing them, under an apparent flush,
to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really vibrate to one social
tone after another, or are these adventures for me now but fond
imaginations? No, we vibrated--or I'll be hanged, as I may say, if _I_
didn't; little as I could tell it or may have known it, little as anyone
else may have known. There were shades, after all, in our democratic
order; in fact as I brood back to it I recognise oppositions the
sharpest, contrasts the most intense. It wasn't given to us all to have
a social tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it in constant
use; whereas the Wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approach
to any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such a
consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a
high shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's and
Charley's reach--heaven knows what _they_ two would have done with it.
The Van Winkles on the other hand were distinctly so provided, but with
the special note that their provision was one, so to express it, with
their educational, their informational, call it even their professional:
Mr. Van Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note of
our own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening of
our general as distinguished from our special sensibility. There was no
Turkey red among those particular neighbours at all events, and if there
had been it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then know it, but
I sipped at a fount of culture; in the sense, that is, that, our
connection with the house being through Edgar, he knew about
things--inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that matter, did little
public Freddy Ward; but the things one of them knew about differed
wholly from the objects of knowledge of the other: all of which was
splendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. It intimated more and
more how many such there would be altogether. And part of the interest
was that while Freddy gathered his among the wild wastes Edgar walked in
a regular maze of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but Edgar
must promptly have known. This impression was promoted by his moving in
a distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me; I dimly
descry him as appearing at Jenks's and vanishing again, as if even that
hadn't been good enough-