the least waste had been prepared from so far back that a sort of
divine economy now fairly ruled. It was doubtless a part of the total
fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, that I knew what everything
meant, not simply then but for weeks and months after, and was to know
less only with increase of knowledge. That must indeed have been of the
essence of the general effect and the particular felicity--only not
grotesque because, for want of occasion, not immediately exhibited: a
consciousness not other than that of a person abruptly introduced into a
preoccupied and animated circle and yet so miraculously aware of the
matters conversed about as to need no word of explanation before joining
in. To say of such a person that he hadn't lost time would, I knew, be
feebly to express his advantage; my likeness to him, at any rate,
probably fell short of an absurd one through the chapter of accidents,
mostly of the happiest in their way too, which, restraining the personal
impulse for me, kept appearances and pretensions down. The feast, as it
more and more opened out, was all of the objective, as we have learned
so comfortably to say; or at least of its convenient opposite only in so
far as this undertook to interpret it for myself alone.

To return at all across the years to the gates of the paradise of the
first larger initiations is to be ever so tempted to pass them, to push
in again and breathe the air of this, that and the other plot of rising
ground particularly associated, for memory and gratitude, with the
quickening process. The trouble is that with these sacred spots, to
later appreciation, the garden of youth is apt inordinately to bristle,
and that one's account of them has to shake them together fairly hard,
making a coherent thing of them, to profit by the contribution of each.
In speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision of Europe, if I may
give so grand a name to a scarce more than merely enlarged and uplifted
gape, I have, I confess, truly to jerk myself over the ground, to wrench
myself with violence from memories and images, stages and phases and
branching arms, that catch and hold me as I pass them by. Such a matter
as my recovery of contact with London for a few weeks, the contact
broken off some nine years before, lays so many plausible traps for me
that discretion half warns me to stand off the ground and walk round it
altogether. I stop my ears to the advice, however, under the pleading
reminder