eguiled way from either domicile); and the whole
impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering
_vitrines_ about the poor Pendletons' bereavement, their loss of their
only, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state
with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which I
find my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and so
quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is
simply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously
urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of
the great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more
bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and
protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at least
esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left
the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his
high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at
a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed
in his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the
way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly
to _be_ on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact
that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the
Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to
the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a
grand big-boy good-humour that--as I remember from childhood the so
frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most
overlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent to
the difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forth
through the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us
with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of such
shreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young
sensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it)
rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever
so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern
to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and
tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful
and every shred seems tangled with another.

Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very
preferably, the frame of