ad had
to do thereby all the work: _she_, of an age to reach so considerably
back, had breakfasted out, in London, and with Mr. Rogers himself--that
was the point; which I am bound to say did for the hour and on that spot
supply richness of reference enough. And I am caught up, I find, in the
very act of this claim for my prior scantness of experience by a memory
that makes it not a little less perfect and which is oddly enough again
associated with a struggle, on an empty stomach, through the massed New
England whiteness of the prime Sunday hour. I still cherish the vision,
which couldn't then have faded from me, of my having, during the age of
innocence--I mean of my own--breakfasted with W. D. Howells, insidious
disturber and fertiliser of that state in me, to "meet" Bayard Taylor
and Arthur Sedgwick all in the Venetian manner, the delightful Venetian
manner which toward the later 'sixties draped any motion on our host's
part as with a habit still appropriate. _He_ had risen that morning
under the momentum of his but recently concluded consular term in
Venice, where margin, if only that of the great loungeable piazza, had a
breadth, and though Sedgwick and I had rather, as it were, to take the
jump standing, this was yet under the inspiration of feeling the case
most special. Only it had _been_ Venetian, snow-shoes and all; I had
stored it sacredly away as not American at all, and was of course to
learn in Half-Moon Street how little it had been English either.

What must have seemed to me of a fine international mixture, during
those weeks, was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside
Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn, in Queen's Gate Terrace, opposite to
Frederic Harrison, eminent to me at the moment as one of the subjects of
Matthew Arnold's early fine banter, one of his too confidently roaring
"young lions" of the periodical press. Has any gilding ray since that
happy season rested here and there with the sovereign charm of interest,
of drollery, of felicity and infelicity taken on by scattered selected
objects in that writer's bright critical dawn?--an element in which we
had the sense of sitting gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out
our young minds and dabbled and soaked them in it as we were to do again
in no other. The beauty was thus at such a rate that people had
references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a
person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming orna