All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked. The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first winter, mainly from a _petit hotel_ somewhere "on the other side," as we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysees; a region at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as a chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hotels_ of archaic type were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank industries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociable note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_. The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony, were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--since that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that matter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what I at least took to be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves; exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons, but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible clustered--so that the more of these there were the more one might imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?--with the remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little English girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing a Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the