Venetian clue--the explanation of everything by the historic
idea. It was a high historic house, with such a quantity of
recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that one
grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might
even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was
having was just the very last. Wasn't it certainly, for instance,
no mere illusion that there is no appreciable future left for
such manners--an urbanity so comprehensive, a form so
transmitted, as those of such a hostess and such a host? The
future is for a different conception of the graceful altogether--
so far as it's for a conception of the graceful at all. Into that
computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these
representative products of an antique culture, at least, and one
of which the secret seems more likely than not to be lost, were
not common, nor indeed was any one else--in the circle to which
the picture most insisted on restricting itself.

Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or
very fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious "value" on an
occasion that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the
complexity of its references. Such old, old women with such old,
old jewels; such ugly, ugly ones with such handsome, becoming
names; such battered, fatigued gentlemen with such inscrutable
decorations; such an absence of youth, for the most part, in
either sex--of the pink and white, the "bud" of new worlds; such
a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for a good
deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a society--that was
clear--in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was
that about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path
of even the most successful little girl. Yet also--let me not be