could stamp and colour the whole passage
ineffaceably, and this even though the more illustrious party to it had
within the minute turned off and left me shaken. I was shaken, but I was
satisfied--that was the point; I didn't ask more to interweave another
touch in my pattern, and as I once more gather in the impression I am
struck with my having deserved truly as many of the like as possible. I
was welcome to them, it may well be said, on such easy terms--and yet I
ask myself whether, after all, it didn't take on my own part some doing,
as we nowadays say, to make them so well worth having. They themselves
took, I even at the time felt, little enough trouble for it, and the
virtue of the business was repeatedly, no doubt, a good deal more in
what I brought than in what I took.

I apply this remark indeed to those extractions of the quintessence that
had for their occasion either one's more undirected though never
fruitless walks and wanderings or one's earnest, one's positively pious
approach to whatever consecrated ground or shrine of pilgrimage that
might be at the moment in order. There was not a regular prescribed
"sight" that I during those weeks neglected--I remember haunting the
museums in especial, though the South Kensington was then scarce more
than embryonic, with a sense of duty and of excitement that I was never
again to know combined in equal measure, I think, and that it might
really have taken some element of personal danger to account for. There
_was_ the element, in a manner, to season the cup with sharpness--the
danger, all the while, that my freedom might be brief and my experience
broken, that I was under the menace of uncertainty and subject in fine
to interruption. The fact of having been so long gravely unwell sufficed
by itself to keep apprehension alive; it was our idea, or at least quite
intensely mine, that what I was doing, could I but put it through,
would be intimately good for me--only the putting it through was the
difficulty, and I sometimes faltered by the way. This makes now for a
general air on the part of all the objects of vision that I recover, and
almost as much in those of accidental encounter as in the breathlessly
invoked, of being looked at for the last time and giving out their
message and story as with the still, collected passion of an only
chance. This feeling about them, not to say, as I might have imputed it,
_in_ them, wonderfully helped, as may be believed, the extrac