178 PRÆTERITA-I

exalted because I went in at the same door with boys who had square caps on. The lectures were on early English literature, of which, though I had never read a word of any before Pope, I thought myself already a much better judge than Mr. Dale. His quotation of “Knut the king came sailing by” stayed with me;¹ and I think that was about all I learnt during the summer. For, as my adverse stars would have it, that year, my father’s partner, Mr. Domecq, thought it might for once be expedient that he should himself pay a complimentary round of visits to his British customers, and asked if meanwhile he might leave his daughters at Herne Hill to see the lions at the Tower, and so on. How we got them all into Herne Hill corners and cupboards would be inexplicable but with a plan of the three stories! The arrangements were half Noah’s ark, half Doll’s house, but we got them all in: Clotilde, a graceful oval-faced blonde of fifteen; Cécile, a dark, finely-browed, beautifully-featured girl of thirteen; Elise, again fair, round-faced like an English girl, a treasure of good nature and good sense; Caroline, a delicately quaint little thing of eleven. They had all been born abroad, Clotilde at Cadiz, and of course convent-bred; but lately accustomed to be much in society during vacation at Paris. Deeper than any one dreamed, the sight of them in the Champs Élysées had sealed itself in me, for they were the first well-bred and well-dressed girls I had ever seen-or at least spoken to. I mean of course, by well-dressed, perfectly simply dressed, with Parisian cutting and fitting. They were all “bigoted”-as Protestants would say; quietly firm, as they ought to say-Roman Catholics; spoke Spanish and French with perfect grace, and English with broken precision: were all fairly sensible, Clotilde sternly and accurately so, Elise gaily and kindly, Cécile serenely, Caroline keenly. A most curious galaxy, or southern cross, of unconceived stars, floating on a sudden into my obscure firmament of London suburb.

¹ [Ruskin quotes it in Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 69 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 338).]

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