further on
the Saturday mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) when we
were swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then much
domesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itself
from the first, to Wall Street and the torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst,
our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpled
and so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark and glossy wig, that
he had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in _their_ youth
as well, since, in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, they were,
dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. He extremely
resembles, to my mind's eye, certain figures in Phiz's illustrations to
Dickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our elders
must, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of the
vindictive, be making us "pay" for what they in like helplessness had
suffered from him: as if _we_ had done them any harm! Our analysis was
muddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there were
compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I could
easily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godey's Lady's Book,
a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less
stony light of the Wall Street of those days and through the smell of
ancient anodynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement while
we waited: I was to encounter in Phiz's Dombey and Son that design for
our tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to the
spell of Godey, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne before
the fact as well as after; since I remember poring, in his pages, over
tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the
chair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music of
my brother's groans. This must have been at the hours when we were left
discreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself of
the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come back
for us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and
notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed
through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which
bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. Wasn't
part of the charm of life--since I assume that there _was_ such a
charm--in its being then (I allude to life itself) so much m