Page:Tales of Three Cities (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1884).djvu/319

Rh paint, and what not to paint, even though his interpretation were sometimes rather too sketchy. It will have been guessed that he was an impressionist; and it must be admitted that this was the character in which he proceeded on his visit to Miss Daintry. He was constantly shutting one eye, to see the better with the other, making a little telescope by curving one of his hands together, waving these members in the air with vague pictorial gestures, pointing at things which, when people turned to follow his direction, seemed to mock the vulgar vision by eluding it. I do not mean that he practised these devices as he walked along Beacon Street, into which he had crossed shortly after leaving his mother's house; but now that he had broken the ice, he acted quite in the spirit of the reply he had made to a friend in Paris, shortly before his departure, who asked him why he was going back to America,—"I am going to see how it looks." He was of course very conscious of his eye; and his effort to cultivate it was both intuitive and deliberate. He spoke of it freely, as he might have done of a valuable watch or a horse. He was always trying to get the visual impression; asking himself, with regard to such and such an object or a place, of what its "character" would consist. There is no doubt he really saw with great intensity; and the reader will probably feel that he was welcome to this ambiguous privilege. It was not important for him that things should be beautiful; what he sought to discover was their identity,—the signs