extension of interest and admiration--she was in those years quite
exceedingly handsome--ranked for us with the Albany aunts, adding so a
twist, as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her own close
kin. This couple must have been, putting real relatives aside, my
parents' best friends in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm
thread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other to
their supposed felicity. The real relatives, those planted out in the
same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose
place in our vision, I should like to trace: that of the Kings, for
instance, of my mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's--the
Kings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social and
moral possibilities at Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous but
more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during a
considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable _agrement_ at Tours
and at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the winter Trouville, on the
lowest possible terms. Fain would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it,
under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the
singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin Charlotte of the former
name, who figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked,
and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel of
placid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return from
China after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's
death in the Red Sea--which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of
death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some Christmas treat of our
childhood under her roof in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in
that twilight of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, Anne, Arthur, marked to
us always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives the
most intensely educated and most pointedly proper--an occasion followed
by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. I would
keep her in my eye through the Genevese age and on to the crisis of the
Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his
Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of
understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of its
end--he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from
first wounds, as under his mother's malediction--on the stone beneath
which he lies in