hrough the apprehension that something vague
and sweet--if I shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite future
point and application--would come of it. This is a reminiscence that
nothing would induce me to verify, as for example by any revisiting
light; but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what I was
pleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine for my
obscurely specific sense of things, that I _should_ so have hung about.
The name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate a
persuasion that I must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the very
grace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always a
place of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively
blank, blank _after_ ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things,
blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's "ennui of the middle
ages," rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states,
which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determined
pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no
amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where,
among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from some
native and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever so
long. That was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution--the
question of whether or no I should at a given moment find the old
picture replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass for an
event--yet an event which would _have_ to have had for its scene the
precious Rue des Vieillards, and pale though may be the recital of such
pleasures I lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain of
ingenuity.

All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowance
for my service to good M. Ansiot, rendered while my elder and younger
brothers--the younger completing our group of the ungovernessed--were
continuously subject to collegial durance. Their ordeal was, I still
blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine, during
our longer term of thrifty exile from Paris--the time of stress, as I
find I recall it, when we had turned our backs on the Rue Montaigne and
my privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons.
Mild M. Ansiot, "under" whom I for some three hours each forenoon sat
sole and underided--and actually by himself too--was a curiosity, a
benignity, a futility even, I gather; b