had never been properly settled for him, and it's one there's ever a
great difficulty in a gentleman's settling for himself. Born in Paris,
he had been brought up altogether on French lines, in a family that
French society had irrecoverably absorbed. His father, a Carolinian and
a Catholic, was a Gallomaniac of the old American type. His three
sisters had married Frenchmen, and one of them lived in Brittany while
the others were ostensibly seated in Touraine. His only brother had
fallen, during the Terrible Year, in defence of their adopted country.
Yet Gaston, though he had had an old Legitimist marquis for godfather,
was not legally one of its children; his mother had, on her death-bed,
extorted from him the promise that he wouldn't take service in its
armies; she considered, after the death of her elder son--Gaston, in
1870, had been a boy of ten--that the family 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