en tree, and which symbolised as nothing
else the ritual dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came back
but to the dragees de bapteme, not strictly more immemorial to our young
appreciation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" cake known to
us in New York, yet immensely more official and of the nature of
scattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed to
me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumbered
with them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they
were somehow so important and so historic.

It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional
presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of
the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at
all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free
approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record
alluded, at that time doing his baccalaureat on the other side of the
Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my
awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to
quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes
for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically
plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to,
had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be
"finished," educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousin
Charlotte was the only proper one--and I feel sure he can have acquitted
himself in this particular in a manner that would have passed for
brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards,
always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to develop
more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhuman
reasons--at Marseilles, at Duesseldorf (if I rightly recall their
principal German sojourn), at Naples, above all, for a long stage;
where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as
those of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time,
attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in their
fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the
concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, few
but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image,
the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early
baffled and g