see for how utterly vague they must show--of
picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far
from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and
that that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an
education might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yet
didn't--I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to
glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.
If we had been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher
intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so--to any point worth
mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the
worst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgs
nothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other:
which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been
stupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our
chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and
disengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones,
whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and not
to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for
any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and
the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I
positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually
interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of
the too fine tissue.

XXVI

I allude of course in particular here to the aesthetic clue in general,
with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled,
without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such
rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us,
involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, for
my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre
for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly
dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half
explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was
perceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether
definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we
gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange
and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so
litt