indeed appeared ever since, that this brief
record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, as I have equally
noted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as
she lived; and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, as they
always called it, but prematurely to die.

XXIX

I feel that much might be made of my memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer had I
but here left room for the vast little subject; in which I should
probably, once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, as
perceivingly, as discoveringly, I am fairly tempted to call it, as might
really give the measure of my small operations at the time. I was almost
wholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficially
idle order at which we have already so freely assisted; reduced by a
cause I shall presently mention, the production of a great blur,
well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerably
spreading grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, such as it
was, more or less immediately about me. I must personally have lived
during this pale predicament almost only by seeing what I could, after
my incorrigible ambulant fashion--a practice that may well have made me
pass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional--rather than by
pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, to whatever
intensity, our on the whole widening little circle. The images I speak
of as matter for more evocation that I can spare them were the fruit of
two different periods at Boulogne, a shorter and a longer; this second
appearing to us all, at the time, I gather, too endlessly and
blightingly prolonged: so sharply, before it was over, did I at any rate
come to yearn for the Rue Montaigne again, the Rue Montaigne "sublet"
for a term under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a
"financial crisis" of great violence to which the American world, as a
matter now of recorded history, I believe, had tragically fallen victim,
and which had imperilled or curtailed for some months our moderate means
of existence. We were to recover, I make out, our disturbed balance, and
were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow
repeatedly postponed _real_ opportunity; and the second, the
comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge,
as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for
the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter,