amily had sacrificed enough on
the altar of sympathy.

The young man therefore, between two stools, had no clear sitting-place:
he wanted to be as American as he could and yet not less French than he
was; he was afraid to give up the little that he was and find that what
he might be was less--he shrank from a flying leap which might drop him
in the middle of the sea. At the same time he thought himself sure that
the only way to know how it feels to be an American is to try it, and
he had had many a purpose of making the pious pilgrimage. His family
however had been so completely Gallicised that the affairs of each
member of it were the affairs of all the rest, and his father, his
sisters and his brothers-in-law had not yet begun sufficiently to regard
this scheme as their own for him to feel it substantially his. It was a
family in which there was no individual but only a collective property.
Meanwhile he tried, as I say, by affronting minor perils, and especially
by going a good deal to see Charles Waterlow in the Avenue de Villiers,
whom he believed to be his dearest friend, formed for his affection by
Monsieur Carolus. He had an idea that in this manner he kept himself
in touch with his countrymen; and he had never pitched his endeavour so
high as in leaving that card on the Misses Dosson. He was in search of
freshness, but he needn't have gone far: he would have had but to turn
his lantern on his own young breast to find a considerable store of it.
Like many of his dawdling coaevals he gave much attention to art, lived
as much as possible in that more select world where it is a positive
duty not to bustle. To make up for his want of talent he espoused
the talent of others--that is of several--and was as sensitive and
conscientious about them as he might have been about himself. He
defended certain of Waterlow's purples and greens as he would have
defended his own honour, and there was a genius or two, not yet fully
acclaimed by the vulgar, in regard to whom he had convictions that
belonged almost to the undiscussable part of life. He had not, for
himself, any very high sense of performance, but what kept it down
particularly was his untractable hand, the fact that, such as they were,
Waterlow's purples and greens, for instance, were far beyond him. If he
hadn't failed there other failures wouldn't have mattered, not even
that of not having a country; and it was on the occasion of his friend's
agreement to paint that