If a walk across the Park, with a responsive friend, late on the golden afternoon of a warm week-day, and if a consequent desultory stroll, for speculation's sake, through certain northward and eastward streets and avenues, of an identity a little vague to me now, save as a blur of builded evidence as to proprietary incomes--if such an incident ministered, on the spot, to a boundless evocation, it then became history of a splendid order: but I perhaps must add that it became so for the two participants alone, and with an effect after all not easy to communicate.
--Henry James, The American Scene, 1907