frank
industries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociable
note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_.
The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony,
were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in
spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our
then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or
even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--since
that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that
matter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what I at least took to
be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves;
exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in
honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to
lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism
but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect
for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with
typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons,
but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our
being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been
but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small
guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must
have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of
those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible
clustered--so that the more of these there were the more one might
imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say
how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?--with the
remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that
the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling
lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that
platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral
line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little English
girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing
a Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the
world), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with round
glazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, dragees
de bapteme above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we might
have gathered apples from a shak