Front matter (continued 5)

"Keep tight hold of me, don't let go of me for the tenth of a second—as you seem to do when you won't look at me. I'd rather you all stared me out of countenance at once than kept from me, either one of you, the light of your own. It mayn't strike you that I want more encouragement than I've already had, but I feel I can do with every scrap you'll give me, and that if you'll remember as much as that we shall still have a merry life."

"'Still, still'?" Molly caught this up; she had risen again to her highest pitch. "What on earth, pray, has happened that we shouldn't?—and what can, you wretch, unless it be that we all die for love of you at once? That's the only thing that may be the matter with us—isn't it, mamma?" the girl appealed; "that you're killing us, I mean, with the wonder of you, and that our mother is apparently the first to succumb. Don't change, nevertheless; don't waver by a hair's breadth from what you are at this moment. I want to show you off—I do, I do; and yet I seem at the same time to want you not to be touched—and don't know how that's to be managed!"

This figure, on her lips, determined in Sir Cantopher the play of comment that Ralph had felt to be gathering force; a remark which sufficiently told him, as it dropped, on which side of the line of confidence in him it had fallen. "You're very fine porcelain indeed, no doubt; but, for myself, I shall like, as you'll see, the sense of handling you with care."

It was after Sir Cantopher had spoken that our young man felt himself measure best the attention he had honoured him with, and how much achieved possession of him was noted in the tone of these words. They were even startling as a sequel to his wait for decision, as who should have said, and it was almost as if they quite supremely clinched for our friend in these few instants the irreconcilability of his various desires to oblige. More and more was it that he had come, that he only wanted and needed, to oblige all round; and while he now expressed, so far as any attitude might, whatever intelligence should be most in order, he had the quick idea of suggesting to the four together that they should try to understand and arrange with each other only, making somehow a common ground and not troubling him about the manner of it. He looked thus in the face the fear of being quarrelled about, and was on the point of breaking out with an "Oh there's plenty of me for you all if you'd only believe it and let me see each of you enjoy it!" when Sir Cantopher practically blighted the impulse as by a positive queer revel in that idea of precautions.

"Molly may do what she likes and risk what she likes; she thinks you a wonder and wants to call others to admire, and I think you one too and prefer to be selfish about you—that is to handle you as wisely as wonders should only be handled: we should always know perfectly what we're doing with them. No, no, don't deny it," this eminent judge pursued—"I don't think I should care for you if I really understood you, though I'm at the same time quite willing to believe that when I do understand you, as I hope to on better opportunity, I shall not care for you less. I don't get tired of my treasures, you see—and that's the way to estimate real treasures. We get tired of the false, but see more and more, to the end of time, in the true. I shall nevertheless not interfere," he wound up, turning to Molly—"I shall be so far from wanting him to live only for me, and a monstrous pretension it would be certainly, that seeing how he supports your wear and tear will be half the interest of him, and you must therefore be prepared, my dear child, for my taking still more in yourself than I've perhaps ever yet made you feel."

Ralph broke at once into this with the most nervous of his laughs. "Lord have mercy on us then, how very attentive to each other we're all now going to be! But all I want is that you shan't differ about me—I want you so to agree for your own comfort. I don't want you to like me separately—and in fact don't think I should want you to dislike me in that way either, if you should have to come to it. I want you to like me together"—he talked himself more and more into ease; "I should feel either of you lonely, feel you in difficulties and be sad about you, if one of you, or even two of you, should be moved to any view of me that the others couldn't share. Now don't you call that kind?" he asked of Molly under this growth of assurance; "don't you call that providing for your liking me, and, upon my word, for your hating me still again, with the least trouble to yourselves, since I'm ready to shoulder almost anything?"

The question had the tenderest directness, but once more, for a minute, their common understanding of it, and Molly's own not least, seemed to lapse—his sense was touched by that strange convergent wait. He truly could thus, he should have felt, know at least by renewed experience what it was to feel them united in blankness, make free as he might with those other vanities. It was in the nature of these surprises of their collected wit to be blest in proportion as they were brief, however—and this even though they suggested to him while lasting the question of what would become of him, what would become of all of them, if they did last more than they should. The break was somehow better as coming, if possible, from one of themselves—and now he knew, probably indeed very soon, that it had come in the form of an inquiry of Mrs. Midmore's, made in all gentleness and elegance. "Why is it, please, that you provide so for our hating you? It sounds so dreadfully as if you knew something——!" She pulled up, her words expired, and it was for an instant as if the high and handsome lady, the pitch and sound of whose presence he had so begun with enjoying, had shrunken to a pale, pleading, pathetic person, a person engaged for a moment in the fantastic act of trying to buy him off by conciliation. He had a glimpse of something stranger than any conceivable expression of it—of the possibility, that is, of a fear in her of being frightened, with its instinct of gaining time before the danger increased. She smiled a bit convulsively again—she had done so some moments before; but good it was at once withal that the very delicacy of her dread or her desire could make him glow as with foreseeing pity, another throb of the same queer kindness that had stirred him a while back. Yes, yes, he himself shouldn't have cared to apprehend what she apprehended, however the particular point of it might show; and why accordingly shouldn't one be in horror and in pity of contributing to an alarm so gratuitous or in fact, as they said, so false? It was true at the same time indeed that there was no answer to her last imputation which wouldn't leave him still rather more staring at it for himself than brushing it away for her: which was the sense in fact in which he promptly enough replied.

"I ask myself, when you tell me that I strike you as 'knowing' something, what it is I can know that wouldn't be a good deal more to your advantage than to mine if you were to find it out! I don't know anything that I conceal," he smiled and smiled; "no, no, no, I seem to myself to know so much more than anything else what I've learnt from yourselves in the last hour or two, that if you were to turn me inside out I can't imagine your coming on the least little scrap that would shock you!" So he spoke, though, carry it off as he would, this plea of his own didn't meet the fact that parts of his consciousness into which he didn't want to peep, into which he could positively choose not to, appeared to beset him even while he thus reasoned. And somehow it contributed to this appearance that Molly had, at contact with her mother's peculiar earnestness, quickly rallied again to the defence of her apparently fond fancy.

"Ah I won't have that, sir, again—that you're not in possession of matters of your own which it may be our affair, say, to find out if we can, and yours to keep us from learning if we haven't the courage or the cleverness. I won't have it, as I told you long ago"—and she herself spoke, it oddly struck him, as if it had been a month—"that the character I marry should be a bigger simpleton than I, since of course a young lady bred as my mother has bred me really knows less about the world in many ways than even the most commonplace man, let alone such gentlemen as Mr. Pendrel and Sir Cantopher."

Sir Cantopher took this from her as if she really rendered him a service by associating her two gentlemen in that connection: it so supremely stuck out of him at last that he must desire but to refine, under a strong motive, upon the pleasant propriety of their being thrown together. "Every word you say"—he addressed himself to Ralph—"adds to the pleasure your company seems to promise, and I had best warn you at once perhaps that if you have some singular reason for wanting to appear commonplace you would do well to forswear it at once: your effort to act upon it makes you, you see, so remarkable!"

Still wound up to his amenity then, Ralph yielded to this plea—even if it seemed to breathe upon him afresh that chill of the inevitable, residing now in his so witnessed power to raise to the highest point the forces of attention he excited, the repetition of which, from one quarter and another, hadn't even yet taught him how to carry off the fact that he braved it. For he did brave it, he was braving it, braving it at that very moment in his grimaced understanding with Sir Cantopher, the understanding that his face invited the others also to see he didn't fear. What had been deep within him for weeks and weeks but exactly that measure of it now more and more heaped up and the interest of dealing with which had originally so inspired him? "I'm in your hands, as I've told you before"—he smiled and smiled; "I'm in your hands, I'm in your hands!"

"Ah but don't say it as if I were going to drag you to the assizes or the pillory!" Sir Cantopher gave way to that special shade of his amusement which was somehow all edges and points.

Ralph winced for a moment as one who feels in an offered love-pat the touch of a prickly glove—winced fairly to the extent of again dropping his presence of mind and once more snatching it up. "Is that the way I say it?" he asked of Molly with such a flush of tender protest as to make her fix him an instant with the very widest eyes she had yet opened and then come at him straight. She didn't speak as she crossed to him, and it was wondrous to him to feel and to know a few seconds later that this was because the attempt for her would have been but formless sound. She answered him otherwise; her arms were round his neck and her face pressed there, while, with his own gratefully bent to it, he felt her hold him in a clasp of possession that was like a resistance to something unseen. He couldn't for that minute himself speak, though the sense of his clutch articulated would have been "Hold me, yes; hold me close, close, and let us stay this way!" They did stay in fact—or when he next measured time it was as if they had been wholly and incalculably absent: so absent, and for so long, that on his reckoning again with the conditions about him they struck him at once as different and as somehow mastered. Had he literally and in so extraordinary a manner slept in his mistress's arms? There was no one to ask it of but poor Perry—for Sir Cantopher apparently had in the interval departed, Mrs. Midmore attending him out of sight, and Molly, herself aware of that, was already at the door, her hand on it for the moment, holding it open, while her look at him recognised even to extravagance what they had "done"—as if she wanted him to know that she knew it, though with something in it for her too that drove her, as he might feel, before it.

This was not prolonged, and yet Ralph could note, for his bewilderment, that some time must already have elapsed, since there came in to him by the open door, from hall or staircase, no after-sound of Mrs. Midmore's retirement with her friend. That explained itself, however, with his quick apprehension that they would have passed out by the other door of the room, which was ajar, as it hadn't been before, and which communicated, as he was afterwards to know, with other parts of the ample house, including the secondary staircase and his kinswoman's boudoir—he was for the first time in his life really to conceive that last convenience. He was at any rate apparently to be left alone with Perry, not taking leave of the others, but suddenly quitted by them or with Molly, for the next thing, at the most, committing him a little portentously to her brother. For she had in a few seconds more turned her eyes to Perry, who spoke at once as if she had put him a mute question and as if he had caught some sound from below. This sound in fact, as more of it came by Molly's door, reached Ralph sufficiently to explain her brother's lively comment, the liveliest he had yet uttered on anything at all: "It's Nan, it's Nan!"

The words had on Molly a remarkable effect, making her listen hard for a moment where she stood, and then, without as yet meeting again her lover's attention, appear to understand what was happening. As soon as she had understood she sharply closed the door, while Perry repeated his elation, or whatever it was, of assurance.

"She has got here by herself—she has travelled by the coach! She has come up to see him, damn him!" he said to his sister quite as if Ralph hadn't been present.

"'Damn him'?" she echoed, now looking queerly at Ralph.

"Damn her then!" Perry cried, but again with a happier frankness than he had hitherto used and as if now at last taking Ralph in on his own account.

"I beg your pardon, cousin—but when you wonder so you must damn somebody!"

"Oh I'm quite willing to be damned—if it's at all better for sweet Nan!" And Ralph addressed this by his laugh to Molly as well, who at present, clearly astounded by her sister's act, if they rightly viewed it, hesitated as to the tone about it which should best conform to that understanding with her lover which she had just renewed. He felt in her as she hovered there a certain nobleness of doubt, and how supremely she was enhanced by all these latter signs of a new strain and stress. It was as if she measured as he lacked matter for doing the extravagance of the girl's step, of which she wished, however, to make neither too much nor too little. She ended after a minute by making nearly nothing, for if she simply said to him, as the rather unexpected issue of her thought, "Give her the right advice—she'd take it from you!" this presented the transaction as a brief and inconsiderable thing; almost indeed in the light of Nan's very own motive and with a proportionate readiness involved.

Ralph wreathed himself again in grace. "Why should she take it from me, whom she has never seen and knows nothing about, when she hasn't taken it from others who have so much more title?" So he spoke, but conscious as soon as he had done so that it wasn't really for him to have drawn out the question—it was much rather for him to have kept it as small as she preferred it. He had begun so, hours back, with the reign of felicity, and how the devil came it therefore that he now repeatedly missed that trick? The inquiry did in fact, to all appearance, somewhat disconcert his friend, who still waited long enough there before him to find her answer, which she brought out, as it struck him, with a quick perversity.

"Well then, frighten her straight away again, if you like that better!" With which she simply left him, passing out at once by the door opposite the one she had quitted and closing it sharply behind her.

Ralph turned to Perry in his flush of wonder. "Frighten her away? Do I frighten——?"

Perry kept his great distance, but spoke after an instant in the sense of accommodation. "You don't frighten me—now. You can't, I wouldn't have it even if you wanted to—which I now guess you don't."

"But why in the name of my dearest interest should I?" It was strange again to Ralph, his facing his young kinsman's so exposed, yet so inscrutable sensibility; yet this aspect of him somehow suggested withal that he mightn't at all prove the person from whom there was most to fear. Why, however, at the same time, did this question of fear, suddenly let loose by Molly in her retreat—for wasn't it a retreat?—seem to flutter about the room, itself a scared bird, and make as if for perching on Ralph's own shoulder? It might verily have been perching as our young man, staring about, plucked a fresh apprehension from Perry. "You don't mean that Molly and I frightened off your mother and Sir Cantopher?"

Perry, though always at his distance, was placed by this almost at his ease. "Molly must answer you for herself—but she doesn't really know much more what to make of you than I do."

Ralph's wide eyes stared his reply still more than his lips could form it. "You don't know what to make of me——?"

"Only she likes nevertheless what you do to her that way as her lover. She's not too afraid of you yet for that!" Perry explained with a new authority.

This was extraordinary to Ralph—his having gathered such things to tell from that lapse of their consciousness, Molly's and his own, of anything but their possession of each other. "Oh well, I'm glad I have still that advantage!"—and Ralph kept his laugh at least brave. "But was it because they didn't know what to make of us——?" Perry had really arrived at an approach to clear suggestion. "We're lovers so accepted and blessed——!" He would puzzle it out, but appealed to his Companion for help.

"No, it isn't that they were shocked at your freedom"—Perry said—"though you were free!"

"Then why did they make off?" our young man pressed.

"Well, you must get it from themselves."

"Then is there nothing I shall get from you—as my brother-that's-to-be?"

Perry considered of it, resisting confusion. "I'm not your brother yet."

"No"—Ralph also considered: "not in a single morning!" This exchange, none the less, seemed really to further him, and under the aid of it Ralph kept his stand. "But you like me so."

"I like you——?" Perry rather growled it, but it was as if he wondered.

"I mean you all do, and you will, you'll see,—especially if you find you can assist me. It's there," Ralph explained, "that your goodnature will be touched."

"Oh but I thought it was yours we were so much to look to. Wasn't it you," Perry asked, "that was to come so prodigiously to our assistance?"

"So I take it," Ralph irresistibly smiled; "and what else in the world is it then that I'm so ready for?"

Perry could still mind his steps. "I don't know that you've been striking me as quite so ready!"

"Not so ready as you expected?" It made Ralph's vision jump. "Do you mean that you want money?"

"Indeed I do, by God!"

Ralph stared in fair elation—such an oddity of relief. "Will you have some now?"

"'Now'——?" Something, at this, looked out of Perry's face as not before—a happier, easier Perry, though still embarrassed and divided and with an awkwardness of wonder that made his kinsman laugh out.

"I mean at this very moment"—and Ralph, with the happy thought, clapped his hand to the right pocket of his trousers. It was under the same sort of prompting with which in the earlier part of his talk there with Molly he had appealed to another pocket for that verified possession of his mistress's portrait which so beautifully hadn't failed him; and he consequently beamed all his renewal of support at Perry on feeling his fingers quite plunge into gold. Also he shone, after this fashion, he seemed to know, without undue surprise. The guineas, or whatever they were, literally chinked to his ear, and he saw, the next thing, that they chinked to his companion's as well—which circumstance somehow made them on the instant a perfect mine of wealth. "How much, how much will you have?" he was accordingly justified in gaily asking—and that even while it also played into his exquisite agitation that the Midmores in general had probably ever held the rattle of one's resources in any pocket a vulgar mode of allusion to them. He was so brightly in earnest with his offer, and so interesting it grew and grew each instant to himself, that he would have been willing they should take it for an American freedom caught in the fact. So if it was one it should be a great one, and Ralph kept this up. "You've only to say, you know!" Perry, his head half bent with his trouble, gazed with a bovine air as from over a fence and under his brows—while Ralph felt such surprise, after an instant, at the degree of his difficulty, which suggested positive physical pain, that superlative soothing seemed none too much. His personal confidence moreover had at the first fine touch of his fortune shot straight up, and he rose with it to an extraordinary height. "I want you to understand, you see, that there's really no sum you mayn't name——!" And he chinked and chinked.

Perry's breath, as it had more than once done before, came shorter and shorter, but he still stood off. "You carry all your fortune about you?"

"Not all—only a goodish handful, but a clutch can follow a clutch." And he so liked his clutch that he drew it forth and held it high, shaking it in the air and laughing. "Guess what this alone comes to."

Perry glared up at the hidden treasure—the effort of Ralph's hand completely contained it, but as our young man was about to say, "Mayn't I count it down to you?" the wondering eyes shifted, resting at once, Ralph saw, on another object. He heard nothing, and his back was to the door from the hall, which Perry would have seen noiselessly opened and with the effect of an appeal for admission. Ralph watched his face, but waited before turning, waited as if something hung on it, and only advised somehow by what he noted to lower his fist and restore it slowly to his pocket. And then Perry had spoken. "If you've come up for your share, my dear, he vows he's all ready to put it on the table, and you can be served first if you like."

The whole passage, however, was otherwise so soundless that Ralph listened a full minute for the answer to this remark before facing about.

IV

The girl was for the time stillness incarnate; she carried the burden of what she had done very much after the fashion of a glass filled to the brim, held out at arm's length and sure to overflow at the first jostle. What she had been mutely doing as she stood there must have been to beg her brother to refrain from any word that would make her position more awkward, and that she felt some confidence for this might have appeared, the next instant, in her large grave look at his companion, which struck Ralph as a sign of greeting the most intended, and yet at the same time the shyest, ever made him. She might scarce have expected recognition, but she seemed to take him in with so little felt restriction on staring that he measured at once the relief she enjoyed at finding him only with Perry. She had been wound up, he felt, for something more difficult, and now this was blest, was a reprieve, for he was quickly certain that with Perry she could easily deal—all the more that what he had just said to her wasn't the deprecated jog, inasmuch as it didn't at all reflect upon her, but reflected only on their cousin. Ralph had in her presence still a couple more of extraordinarily swift reflections—one of these perhaps the very most immediate, in its sweetness and clearness, that had visited his consciousness of these rich hours and bearing upon the fact exactly that he was her cousin, hers much more for instance than Molly's, in respect to whom the nature of the relative was swallowed up in the nature of the lover; bearing on it so happily that in the course of another moment he had brought out the beautiful sense in his own greeting, which had the effect of reading into hers everything either he or she could have desired. He didn't grin for this, as he had been doing for Perry—he breathed it softly, but ever so gravely: "Cousin, cousin, cousin!" though after it too, with the same gravity, which yet, as he felt even in uttering the words, was a perfect extravagance: "Isn't it great, great?"

"Great that we're cousins—'great'?" It had broken her stillness happily and, as he figured, without the jostle of her arm; for again it not only left her intrusion ideally unchallenged, but instantly gave it such importance of ground as could in no way whatever be taken from it.

"Well, what I call great," he returned in the liveliest promptitude of explanation; well aware, on the second thought, that it was one of the wrong kinds of turns, one of those that had made the rest of the family exchange wonderments, but eager, within the moment, to be able to judge whether it hadn't perhaps even positively pleased her.

"He calls things in such ways as you've never heard," Perry declared to her as for further and possibly still more convenient information; which Ralph, rejoicing at the comparative sociability of it, straightway took up.

"Of course I do, I know it at once as soon as I've done it, know it by the sound after, after, don't you see?"—he addressed the earnest emphasis only to the girl. "Of course we have different expressions—but I'm going to make you like them. I'm going to make you understand them," he explained in the most serious way.

The happiest thing was that though her appearance had determined in him this sudden earnestness, the confidence shown in her and so quickly heaped up made her break into a smile. "I'm not supposed to understand unless I very much want to. Therefore——!" She only smiled, but it gave Ralph an immediate chance.

"Therefore it's clear that you want to so far as I'm concerned; which it's a grand comfort to feel—for I'm not in the least afraid."

"What have you to be afraid of?" she asked with a readiness that made her brother break in before Ralph could reply.

"You understand between you then, damme, things that I don't!" Which comment, looking from one to the other, he at once and most surprisingly backed up. "You've smashed the great jar at Drydown, and he already knows it, and that you've come up to make your confession."

"Oh I don't in the least know that!" Ralph declared. "What I should like to believe," he said to the girl, "is that you've wanted so to see your new kinsman that you've risked the adventure." His rejoicing gravity was at such a pitch in it that she turned, under this address, from pale to red, and that something in the expression thus produced in her, which was like a rush of some purer intelligence than he had yet touched among them all, determined in him the strangest inward cry. "Why she's modern, modern!" he felt he was thinking—and it seemed to launch him with one push on an extraordinary sea. He in fact wouldn't have been sure the next moment whether he hadn't uttered the queer words, queer, in their sense, even to his own apprehension; though he was afterwards to take it that they had appeared to find no echo, even if he had himself kept on knowing for the moment more or less what he meant by them.

What he meant and what if the air had vibrated to them they would vividly have signified was the very aspect and figure of this slight, fine, concentrated little person, who suffered this last measure mainly indeed as an offered contrast to her splendid sister, and whose appearance was of a fashion so different from any that either Molly or their mother might have set her that she affected him as linked to them but in the degree of one of those sacrificed creatures he had read of in records of the old Catholic world, the oblation made of the plainer and weaker and more thankless daughter to the cloistered life, the glory of God, and the muster in the house of means for no more than one nuptial outfit. All of which, glimmering before him in what was perhaps, if we may choose, his quite most quickened perception, would have married ill with the special intensity of his recognition and qualification had the girl not, by some light and exquisite influence, pleaded against the idea that she concurred in the law of her effacement. She was as sober-hued as any nun, and might well, so far as the material side of her presence went, have been trained to fasts and vigils; but wasn't she rather distinguishably aware of more things in all the world than they, and of different ones from theirs, upon his honour?—so that her longish, narrowish, almost colourless face (with the forehead, markedly high and clear, such as to recall a like feature of some mothering Virgin by Van Eyck or Memling who dimly haunted him, though he couldn't possibly have met her in New York) showed a sort of concentration of consciousness, a strain and degree of expression, which were all that could be referred to as in any way tricking it out.

He had been spending a long time, as it seemed to him, with persons—positively to the number of three—who were indicated to him now as having known, or at least as having been instructed by society, that they were pretty well clever enough for anything they might supposably be concerned with; whereas the light that hung during these moments about sweet Nan, since sweet Nan she at last, and not quite other than disconcertingly, was, appeared rather that of an intelligence rather at sea, or guessing free application to have been so perversely denied it that exactly this mild comfort was what it might have hovered and wavered there to appeal for. They hadn't denied her understanding and Sir Cantopher had in the most pointed manner expressed her possession of it, but if there might have been a sense in Ralph's private greeting to her imaginable energies, it could scarce have helped involving the certitude that the family friend at any rate had read her most wrongly when he had quite most wished to distinguish her. She had suffered from what was wrong, though indeed without being at all pointedly aware of what was right—and this even if it broke upon him as formidable that he should perhaps figure to her as a source of initiation. There were things in her world of imagination, it had taken him so few instants to surmise, which might verily have matched with some of those, the shyer, the stranger, the as yet least embodied, that confusedly peopled his own—though, again, how any such verification of identities, felicities, sublimities, or whatever they might be, could make her "modern" without by the same stroke making him so, he naturally as yet failed of attention to discern. He hadn't, that he knew of, missed from the others any note of their direct command either of their future or of his own; he had only measured some disparities between his and their connection with the past, the effect of his sense of which was that they had the advantage of their perch upon accumulations and continuities more substantially and above all more locally determined. This placed them so little less in the forefront of time that he should by rights at least have appeared to himself comparatively backward in the race—whereby what would there have been in him to make in any special degree for fellowship with this young woman's originality? Never, let us hasten to add, could originality, or any other inspired, independent strain, have more renounced the benefit of a superficial show. The others, as he had seen, weren't proof against bewilderment—which, if she was so different she ought to have been; but the first thing he now next asked himself was how he could ever—let what would come of this precipitated meeting be what it would—press upon her to the least confusion of her at best so troubled fineness. "Modern" was she?—all the more reason then why he should be at once as explanatory as he could. Certain passages of his recent past were affecting him by this time as almost superlatively ancient, and wasn't there one of them that it would at once concern him, in common kindness, let alone common honesty, to make known to her?

"I wasn't aware of your existence," he at all events said to her on taking to himself this perception; "I mean I had never heard of you when I sailed—any more, naturally enough, than when I arrived. It has only been to-day. It came out unexpectedly. But now I'm sure," he went on to the relief of his conscience, of his reason, of his imagination, of he could scarce have said what; to the rectification in any case of something he now knew, the confession made, to have been hurting him like some limb kept in a posture adverse to its function. The gained ease was even too great for joking—he couldn't too plainly state it. "You see I knew all about them—or I felt as if I had done so as soon as I got here; which comes to the same thing, doesn't it?" There he was asking her that, by the way; as if she could tell him whether or no it came to the same thing. Would he have put such a question to her mother, to her sister, to her brother, or even to wondrous Sir Cantopher? It was the kind of question that tended to produce in them that arrest of intercourse; and, extraordinarily enough, it seemed now to hang but by a hair that it might under this new relation make everything easier. Was she going, sweet Nan, to be drawn to him just exactly by certain features of the play of freedom that he had felt warn the others off? Strange certainly that such a satisfaction should within so few moments have begun to breathe upon him—since as a satisfaction, and quite of the freshest, he should know it, that was beyond mistake; and there was nothing to light the anomaly to any degree in his impression that he should be able to make her conceive him better simply by treating her, that is by simply looking at her even, as if she naturally would. This act would be on his part a more conceiving, if withal a more wondering, thing than any yet—though what had, for that matter, ever been so strange as that the shyest, vaguest, least directly protesting pair of eyes ever raised to him should at the same time submit to search after a fashion that was in itself a sort of engagement? "Don't you think you can persuade your brother to accept an accommodation?" he finally asked.

She hadn't replied to his inquiry about its coming or not to the same thing as a proved case that he should have entertained the fancy of assurances—she had but left the appeal in the air. This, however, hadn't in the least stamped her to his vision as stupid; he had only felt at once how many still other things he could put to her. Here was one as to which he should really like her weight thrown if she would let it be and since Perry had named his occasion; as to which too the idea of the explanatory grew in attraction instant. Clearly she didn't yet understand, none the less, too many things at once awaiting her, and the accommodation to Perry, let alone to herself, not having had time to profit by what had at first been said. Here was something of a tangle, but she cut the knot, after another moment, by the light force of her own readiest pressure. "Do you like my mother and my sister now that you've seen them?"

Ralph stared, for beautifully important as this point had been she suddenly made it more so. "Why, cousin, I'm here as Molly's true lover—to marry her, you know, as soon as ever the banns can be published and her wedding-gown bought: so that what sort of a figure should I cut if she wasn't as dear to me as life? She is greater even than I dreamed."

"'Greater'——?" She hung again on this term as she had done before; but it was as if something had happened since then, and she now met his idea in time. "Won't it be that you'll make her great?"

"I hope with all my heart I shall make her happy, but she's splendid," Ralph gravely, almost sententiously, said, "beyond any power of mine to show her off." He clung to his gravity, which somehow steadied him—so odd it was that the sense of her understanding wouldn't be abated, which even a particular lapse, he could see . . .

Notes for THE SENSE OF THE PAST

[1] The Ambassador does of course think him a curious and interesting case of dementia, feels a kind of superior responsibility about him accordingly, is really in a manner "fascinated" and mystified too; and in short quite naturally and inevitably stretches a point to see him, as it were, safely home. This he has it on his mind and his nerves, on his sense of responsibility, effectively to do. But, as naturally, he mustn't acknowledge his conviction, even though Ralph invites him to; and I get I think what I want by making him come down to the street in the cab as from curiosity to test his visitor's extraordinary statement, and then plausibly propose or insist on getting in with him and tracking him, as it were, to his lair: so as to be able to have first-hand evidence of his material situation in the event of whatever further occupation. It's in the street and at the cab door that he makes the point of "seeing home", as if then and there merely extemporised; and with the advantage that I thus seem to get what I remember originally groping for, having groped for, when I broke this off just here so many years ago. I gave up taking time to excogitate my missing link, my jump or transition from this last appearance of my young man's in the modern world, so to speak, and his coming up again, where we next find him, after the dive, in the "old". I think I now have quite sufficiently got that transition—I have it perfectly before me. It passes between them; Ralph himself, on their way, in the cab, or probably better still, outside, on the pavement in Mansfield Square and before the house, expresses all I want; puts it, that is, to his benevolent friend, that he knows now perfectly that on opening the door of the house with his latchkey he lets himself into the Past. He disappears into the Past, and what he has wanted is that his companion shall know he is there; shall be able to give that account of him if he is missed or wanted; shall also perhaps be able to take in all, whatever it is to be, that may yet happen, and believe in his experience if he ever rises to the surface again with it. This of course but clinches the Ambassador's sense of the refined beauty of his mania; though at the same time the very law of my procedure here is to show what is passing in his excellency's mind only through Ralph's detection and interpretation, Ralph's own expression of it—so leaving my own exhibition of it to stand over for my final chapter, my supreme dénoûment, when Aurora What's-her-name, under a tremendous "psychic" anxiety and distress of her own, which has been growing and growing within her commensurately with Ralph's own culmination of distress and anguish in his drama, which we so centrally and interestingly assist at, comes out to London for relief and throws herself upon the Ambassador with the strange story of her condition, matching and balancing so remarkably poor Ralph's own story of the number of months before. An essential point is that the time of duration of Ralph's plunge or dive is exactly the real time that has elapsed for those on the surface—some six months being about what I provisionally see. The horrid little old conceit of the dream that has only taken half an hour, or whatever, any analogy with that, I mean, to be utterly avoided. The duration is in short the real duration, and I know what I mean when I say that everything altogether corresponds. Then it is, in the final situation, that we get, by a backward reference or action, the real logic and process of the Ambassador's view of how it has seemed best to take the thing, and what it has seemed best to "do" in connection with his strange visitor's exhibition. He gives, he states, what has then determined and guided him; and I see that he states it to Aurora all sufficiently and vividly, so that we don't have any clumsiness of his going back to it, I mean to his account of his own procedure, with Ralph himself when we have Ralph at last restored and, as what all that has gone on in the interval makes it, saved: saved from all the horror of the growing fear of not being saved, of being lost, of being in the past to stay, heart-breakingly to stay and never know his own original precious Present again; that horror which his conception of his adventure had never reckoned with, and his manner of getting saved from which, saved by the sacrifice, the self-sacrifice of the creature to whom he confesses, in his anguish of fear, the secret of who and what and how etc. he is, constitutes the clou and crisis and climax of my action as I see it. It will take more working out, which will come but too abundantly, I seem to apprehend, as I go; but I have the substance of it, I have that still, as I had it of old, in my vision, even if a trifle rough, of the two sisters, the mother, Mrs. So-and-so of Drydown, the brother of that period, and whoever or whatever else I may subordinately need—even to the point very possibly of a second young man, the third, that is, in all, who is a wooer or suitor of the younger sister and, for my full kind of quasi-Turn-of-Screw effect, is of a type, a type of the period, entirely opposed to that of the brother. I see him, I have him and his affair, too thoroughly to have to waste words on him here. The more I get into my drama itself the more magnificent, upon my word, I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me. The slow growth on the part of the others of their fear of Ralph, even in the midst of their making much of him, as abnormal, as uncanny, as not like those they know of their own kind etc., etc.; and his fear just of theirs, with his double consciousness, alas, his being almost as right as possible for the "period", and yet so intimately and secretly wrong; with his desire to mitigate so far as he can the malaise that he feels himself, do what he will, more and more produce. There must be an importance for him, I mean about him, in the view of the others; and this must be definite and consist of some two or three very strong and vivid facts—vivid that is to the imagination of people of 1820. Rather beautiful does it seem to me to have two or three of his actual modern facts stick to him and operate in this sense that I try to project: notably his "refinement", though he tries to conceal it, to dissimulate it; notably his being in 1820 as "rich" as he is, or was, in 1910—which counts for an immense well-offness at the earlier period. And then his whole true modern attribute and quality, with a distinguished appearance to match it, and certain things dont il ne peut pas se défaire, that are of the modern pitch of material civilisation, like his perfect and soignées teeth, for example, which that undentisted age can't have known the like of, and which constitute a part of his troubled consciousness of complication. He dissimulates, he succeeds, he fits in above all because he pleases, pleases at the same time that he creates malaise, by not being like them all; which it is that gives me what I just above threw out this question for, his "importance". Without the importance I don't see the situation for him at all as I want it, and yet I must bring it in on lines of sufficient verisimilitude—even though while I say this the element so visualised fills me with the effect to be got out of it: I mean the charm and interest and fineness of that. In short once I have the importance, as I say, I have everything: the rest all clusters round it. Yes, the more I think of the little man (he must be little) who circles about the younger sister, and of whom she has an intimate horror—he rich, by the way, too, and thereby desired by the mother, and with a small sort of raffiné (of that time) Horace Walpole atmosphere about him—but in short I needn't talk of him thus; I possess him too entirely. I keep missing, at the same time, all the while, my fact of putting the essence of what I see straight enough thus—the postulate of the young man from America arriving, coming upon the scene, somehow designated or arranged for in advance as to one or other of the sisters (I leave it rough and a little in the air, so to speak, for the moment. The just how and just why I can dispose of in a page when in closer quarters.) The point is that the wrong sister, abetted by the mother, pounces on him, as it were—it's the elder one I see doing this; and it so befalls that he is booked, as we say, to marry her, before, with all the precautions he has to keep, he can, as we also say, turn round. So it is that after a little, after the flush of the amusement of his extraordinary consciousness having begun a bit to abate in the light of the brutalities etc., what I call to myself most conveniently his dawning anguish glimmers and glimmers; what it means to see himself married to the elder sister and locked up with her there in that form of the Past. He conceals, he successfully does so, his growing malaise, all the effort and unrest of which, by the by, makes him, he sees, appear to them "clever" beyond anything they have ever dreamed of (they, also, by the way, must pass for clever, as 1820 understood it;) and I catch also, parenthetically, at my need for their not being, with all their pride of gentility, at all as conveniently well-off as they would like, or must require, this fact helping greatly the importance for them that he is possessed of means that seem to them quite blessedly large. The note of their thrift, a certain hardness of meanness, the nature of their economies, the brutality (I keep coming back to that) of their various expedients—this and that and the other Ralph has to take in. Meanwhile he is committed to the elder sister—and we have the effect on her of his importance, his means, his cleverness, mixed up with that in him which is mystifying to all of them, but which the elder sister at first at least sets down to the action and the play of a cleverness, a strange cleverness from over the sea, such as she has never before conceived. She holds on and on to him even after the malaise, and his sense of it in them, with his still greater sense of it in himself, has quite begun, as it were, to rage; with which: oh I see somehow such beautiful things that I can hardly keep step with myself to expatiate and adumbrate coherently enough. Let me just nail 2 or 3 things, by 2 or 3 of the roughest simplest strokes, in order to catch and hold them fast before I go on. All the while, all the while, the younger sister, who is ever so touching, charming, really appealing for him—all the while, all the while. I know what I mean by this sufficiently just to see and note here that the elder does after a while break off under the action of the malaise, which Ralph is in the extraordinary position of having in a way to work against and being also, as a means of release to him, grateful to. I can't take time to catch at this moment, but keep it till the next chance, my notation of how and where the younger sister, the one who really would have been meant for him, the one for the sake of whom he would almost really swing off backward—my notation, I say (after a break of dictation) of the origin and growth of the special relation between Ralph and herself; she being of course the nearest approach—and in fact it's very much of an approach—that I have in the whole thing to a Heroine. I seem to myself now to have intended somehow, in my original view, an accident, a complication, a catastrophic perversity or fatality, as it were, through which Ralph has addressed himself from the first to the elder, the wrong, sister instead of the younger, the right—and when I try to recover what I so long ago had in my head about this there glimmers out, there floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like this, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and that as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist. Of course I am afraid of twists, I mean of their multiplying on my hands to the effect of too much lengthening and enlarging and sprawling; but the bit that I speak of now is surely of the very essence of the situation. It connects itself with something so interesting and effective, so strong and fine, to express—from the moment one successfully tackles it. "This" then, what I mentioned above, is that Ralph has "taken over" from the other party to his extraordinary arrangement certain indications that have been needed for starting the thing, and which I think of him as having, under the operation of the whole prodigy, very considerably, very enormously, assimilated. Enormous, however, as the assimilation may be, it is not absolutely perfect, and don't I exactly get out of this wavering margin, this occurrence of spots and moments, so to speak, where it falls short, just one of those effects of underlying distress, of sense of danger, as I comprehensively call it, which are of the very finest essence of one's general intention? He knows his way so much and so far, knows it wonderfully, finds his identity, the one he wears for the occasion, extraordinarily easy considering the miracle of it all; but the very beauty of the subject is in the fact of his at the same time watching himself, watching his success, criticising his failure, being both the other man and not the other man, being just sufficiently the other, his prior, his own, self, not to be able to help living in that a bit too. Isn't it a part of what I call the beauty that this concomitant, this watchful and critical, living in his "own" self inevitably grows and grows from a certain moment on?—and isn't it for instance quite magnificent that one sees this growth of it as inevitably promoted more and more by his sense of what I have noted as the malaise on the part of the others? Don't I see his divination and perception of that so affect and act upon him that little by little he begins to live more, to live most, and most uneasily, in what I refer to as his own, his prior self, and less, uneasily less, in his borrowed, his adventurous, that of his tremendous speculation, so to speak—rather than the other way round as has been the case at first. When his own, his original, conquers so much of the ground of that, then it is that what I have called his anguish gets fuller possession of it—it being so one thing to "live in the Past" with the whole spirit, the whole candour of confidence and confidence of candour, that he would then have naturally had—and a totally different thing to find himself living in it without those helps to possibility, those determinations of relation, those preponderant right instincts and, say, saving divinations. Don't I put it at first that he is excited and amused and exhilarated by the presence of these latter, by the freedom with which he lives and enjoys and sees and knows: the exhilaration proceeding during the "at first" time, as I put it, by the sense, the fairly intoxicating and spell-casting consciousness of how the inordinate business is going. His sense of success, which there is just enough of his critical margin or edge to appreciate, to estimate, and thus relate to his former consciousness and his whole starting-point, this creates for him a part of the success, the success with the others, by the very spirit and glamour (to them) that it gives him and that keeps up till the change I visualise, the inevitable difference, to phrase it roughly, begins—begins by something that happens, something that springs out of the very situation itself for portent, for determination, and which I must work out, or work into, exactly the right dramatic identity for. This I guarantee; but meanwhile I am ahead of my argument, and must hark back for a few minutes to what I left standing and waiting above—that "this" which I was there about to follow up. At once, withal, I see it in images, which I must put as they come, and which make for me thus, don't I seem to feel? one of the first, if not the very first passages of my action. An action, an action, an action must it thus insuperably be—as it has moreover so well started with being—from the first pulse to the last. Ralph, taking leave of the Ambassador, the depositary of his extraordinary truth and the (as he hopes) secured connection with the world he cuts himself loose from, dropping as from a balloon thousands of feet up in the air, and not really knowing what smash or what magically soft concussion awaits him—Ralph, I say, in entering the house then walks at a step straight into 1820 and, closing the door behind him, shuts out everything to which he has hitherto belonged. He is from that minute, to his own eyes and all his own faculties, the young man in the portrait, the young man we have seen advance to him that night of his vigil in the drawing-room. This bridge or effective transition from the visit at the Embassy to the central drama is thus found and is as good as another for my purpose—swift and straight and simple and direct; as I have on a foregoing page, however, sufficiently stated. Well then, I want to make it, within, his arrival, practically, from America to the London family: as to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?—to the fact of which an awkwardness and a difficulty would, I seem to make out, or do, rather, immediately attach. No, no—no latch-key—but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker; having effected which he stands there a moment, I think, his head very triumphantly high and confident, looking from the steps down at the Ambassador on the pavement; this latter isolated now, by Ralph's having paid and discharged the cab, which has driven away, the moment they got out. What I glanced at as happening between them just thereafter takes place on the pavement, as I have noted, but with this difference, I see with a minute's further intensity of focussing, that he does—well, what I have just stated. Only I seem to want a dumb passage between the two men while the Ambassador just stands, just lingers, as if now at last verily spellbound. I mustn't forget, by the way, that I have spoken of the rain, or that Ralph has, at the Embassy, and that his Excellency can't be represented as standing there without a vehicle and under his umbrella. So it has been constate on their coming out of the Embassy that the rain has stopped during Ralph's visit, so that it's all the more quite over when they reach the square. The Ambassador has said, in reference to the cab, "Oh I won't keep it—I'll walk home; you've really made me need to shake myself!" Thereby I get him held there for the minute seeing the last of Ralph after the latter has knocked and before the door is opened. Ralph turns on its opening—it is held open wide for the moment, and as I seem to see this altogether in latish daylight of a spring, say of a March or April, season, it is no lighted interior that is for a moment exhibited, but just such a Bloomsbury entrance hall as may very well meet the eye to-day. Within then, Ralph arrives; and what for the moment I want summarily to mark is simply that the elder sister is the first person in the "drama" that he sees. She must be handsome, very—handsomer in an obvious way than the younger; not yet at all in sight—not in sight, I think, till after the three others have been, the mother and the two young men, who a little announce and prepare her. It even may be a little, I think, that she is for the time away from home and doesn't return till after the situation is otherwise started. Well then, here it is that what Ralph knows, what he is in possession of and has the general preparation for, is so far precarious and, so to speak, treacherous, that—well, all I want to say now is, before I break off, that he takes her, takes the elder one, for the right young woman. This seems easy—so right, in her way, does she appear to be. He knows, he has "had it", from the 1820 young man, what is expected of him in regard to one of the young women; how, in what manner and on what terms and by what understanding it has come to be expected, remaining questions that I shall adequately, not to say brilliantly, dispose of. What I seem to want is to get the relation between these two started on the spot, before any other relation whatever takes place for my young man; feeling as I do that once it is started I can abundantly take care of it. I even ask myself whether I mayn't have my hero's very first impression, the very first of all, of my second man, as I call him, the one other than the brother, who is there for the second sister and whom he should perhaps do well to find alone in the room when he is introduced, waiting there for the others, the objects of his call, and constituting Ralph's immediate impression. It is to them, say, that the first sister enters—so indefeasibly and luminously, as it were, do I see my procedure ruled by the drama, the quasi-scenic movement, or essential march and logic and consistency, at any rate. However, I am not pretending in these words, in this rough scenario, to go into any but the most provisional and general particulars. What I want is that my young man should inevitably and naturally dazzle, and become aware of it, by the very force of his feeling the distinction and privilege of the prodigious element that has launched him. The others don't in the least know what it is in him, but what I want to make ressortir from it is that he "does" the other fellow, his ancient prototype, the expected cousin from America, with no end of gentility etc. There must be at the same time, of course I see, enormous foreshortenings, great compression and presentation of picture: I want something of this sort to show before the second daughter turns up. Of course such questions as whether it was of the period that the elder one, bred as girls of that time were bred, would "come down" to a couple of "gentlemen visitors" alone, and as by a kind of anticipation of our current modernity—of course such a detail as that is a perfectly easy thing to handle and make right. At the same time withal, in respect to what I said just above about the scenic, let me keep before me how the very essence of all this is to stick as fast as possible to the precedent of the "Screw", in which foreshortening abounded and I didn't, and couldn't, at all hand my subject over to the scenic. The present is of course a much larger and more complicated affair, lending itself much more to the scenic, even in a manner insisting on it a little, or a good bit; but I must guard, guard and all the while intensely guard, myself, none the less—or I shall sprawl out over ever so much more ground than I shall want, or at all need, for my best effect, to cover. If I may but look it well in the face that the thing can only afford in a very minor degree, not in the least in a preponderant one, to express itself scenically, it takes very little further thinking to see how vital that is, and that the particular effect I want most to catch, that of the crescendo of the malaise, really demands and depends upon the non-scenic for its full triumph. I grasp this entirely; I see how "narrative representation" most permits, most effectively prepares and accompanies, my turning of my present screw, and what a part picture and image and evoked aspect and sense can play for me in that connection.

I catch, it seems to me, with a certain amount of vision already two or three, not to say three or four, of my essential hinges or, as I have called 'em, clous, that mark the turns or steps of the action. The first of these is the appearance on the scene of the second daughter after things have got well under way in respect to the first. The first is the fullblown flower—she mustn't be at all too young, by the way; must be going on to thirty, say—and very little trumpet-blow takes place about her, on the part of the others, in advance: all pointing to the fact that she's a sort of neglected quantity—whom nevertheless the little Horace Walpole man does appreciate and pretend to; under all encouragement from the others who think him quite more than good enough for her, though not good enough, no, for the elder sister. Beware, by the way, of any little false step here: don't make the pretender in question too too eligible or, in the modern lingo, smart; since if this were so Ralph wouldn't pass for more desirable. I must keep him a bit down, in the right sort of way and degree, in comparison with Ralph; bearing in mind at the same time that a sort of leading note in it all is his, our's, sense of the hard old class rigour governing the life about him and of which he sees the salience at every turn. The reappearance at home of the second girl, from wherever she has been (expressible in 10 words) at any rate is, as it were, my first clou or hinge; a fact, an impression, an apprehension, that immediately makes such a difference for Ralph. I forget already whether I said just above that the H.W. man talks to him, takes him into his confidence about her, even to the point of recognising to R. that she doesn't care for his suit and has much incurred her mother's, sister's and even brother's reprobation by that attitude. Vividness to R. of the reign of authority at that time, the much harder rule and discipline; and how half terrified at what she is doing by hanging back, by resisting, the poor girl herself is all the while. Her first relation to him is that of her appealing exactly from this rigour; her first impression of him and emotion about him, he sees, he gives us to see, is that of a sudden this fine young American relation is a person who may side with her, may help her, may intervene and back her up in not accepting addresses from a person she can't get over her dislike of. Yes, that's their first basis, and for this appeal Ralph must have been prepared by his own sense of the kind of uncanny, to put it in a simplified way, little personage her aspirant is. They come nearer together on that, they meet on that, they talk, they begin to understand each other on that—very great though Ralph's responsibility in the matter, the matter of backing up her refusal, may be. It's at any rate the way the real relation with them, with him—his sense of the ancient brutality of the others to her, her mother, her brother, her sister, stirring finely within him. She hasn't dreamed herself, he sees, of any real equality of transaction, of relation with him at all; for if the others are under the dazzle, so much the more under it is she. She sees—that is he sees that she sees; he likes her to like him;—which is what gives her the sense of a privilege she trembles up into the enjoyment of, astonished at herself in her exquisite humility (this so touching to R.) even while doing so, The great thing is that he gets into relation with them, and that by the time he has done so the sense of how he needs it, the dim vagueness as yet of how she may perhaps help him, has begun to work in him. He sees, he feels, I make out, that she, as it were, understands him—though how and why she does demands full specification; that in fine what affects the others as his secret, as his queerness, as what they don't know what to make of in him, does the reverse of putting her off—it makes her somehow feel that beneath or within all his dazzle he is an object for pity, for pity "about which" she could perhaps do something. The ideal thing for dramatic interest and sharpness would be that there is just one matter in which, just one point at which, just one link with his other identity by which, he betrays himself, gives himself away, testifies supremely to his alienism, abnormalism, the nature of his identity in fine; the ideal thing would be that, I say, and that it should be definite and visible, absolutely catchable-in-the-act, enough for her to seize it, come into possession of it, and yet not merely terrify or horrify her: affect her in short, on the contrary, with but a finer yearningness of interest. The ideal, as I say, would be that this fact or circumstance should be tremendously right from the tone of the "Screw" point of view, should be intensely in the note of that tone, should be a concrete and definite thing. Find it find it; get it right and it will be the making of the story. It must consist of something he has to do, some condition he has to execute, some moment he has to traverse, or rite or sacrifice he has to perform—say even some liability he has to face and the occurrence of which depends somehow on the state in which he keeps himself. I seem to see it, it glimmers upon me; though I didn't think of it at first—I hadn't originally got as far as it—it hovers before me though in the form of the only thing it can be. When I call it a liability I seem to catch it by the tip of the tail; seem to get a sort of sense of what it may in a manner be. Let me figure it out a bit, and under gentle, or rather patiently firm, direct pressure it will come out. He is liable then say to glimpses of vision of the other man, the one portrayed in the picture and whom he had had the portentous passage with before going to the Ambassador; he is liable, put it, to recurrences of a sense of that presence—which thus, instead of being off in the boundless vast of the modern, that is of the Future, as he has described its being to the Ambassador, does seem to him at times to hover and to menace: only not to the appearance or effect of reassuring or relieving him, but only to that of really quite mocking and not pitying him, of showing him to himself as "sold", horribly sold. Say it's as if the man of 1820, the Pendrel of that age, is having so much better a time in the modern, that is in the Future, than he is having in the present, his Present, which is the Past, that a chill and a fear, the growth of a despair and a terror, drop upon him from it and signify somehow that he must begin to feel himself lost. That's it, that's it, that may be admirable, if I can get the right hinge or play for it—which of course I can. He hasn't expected it, I think—unless I represent something of it as coming back to him, while he wonders, from that passage between him and the other fellow which we know, so far as we do know, only by his projection of it to the Ambassador—after our having seen the other fellow approach, that is, at the climax of the first, or the critical, night spent by Ralph in the house. We have come to know something of this later on by our sight of his own mental references to it; so that these relations may quite sufficiently hang together for us. Well, what I want is that once he has the extraordinary experience (the experience within the experience) of his being under observation by his alter ego, once he has had it in an acute form and connected it wonderingly with some cause, he feels liable to it again if the same kind of cause shall recur; which by the time the phenomenon takes place has for him much more, as I have said above, a suggestion of menace than a suggestion of relief. That's it—it's as if the other fellow feels, knows, has some incalculable divination, of his, Ralph's weakening, while nothing is further from himself than to weaken; whereby Ralph connects, as I quite grasp, the consequence with the cause. There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out—the successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the very points and under the very taps that I reserve for them. That's it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the perfection and salience of each, and the trick is played. I seem to see it thus a silver nail that my young man recognises—well—what he does recognise—when the younger girl (for whom, as for them all, I should do well to provide a name without more delay) swims into his ken, and it's another one, another clou d'argent, when the wave of his confidence seems to have begun to spend itself, doing this, however, in face of something that has taken place. Just what this thing is must constitute another silver nail, and I see it thereby as some symptom given, on the part of the others, of a change of attitude, a change of sensibility, as I must call it, or at least may, for want of a better word. I think it of superior force that they, the others, all except my young heroine, shall begin on their side the betrayal of malaise, which Ralph is then affected by; rather than that he should begin it, making it thus that they are by the operation, the outward betrayal, of that condition of his own. Here I have the action of the little H.W., who, moved thereto (I express myself thus roughly) by the situation determined for his own interest through the terms appearing destined to develop between R. and the girl, and this though R. isn't at all free for the girl, opens himself on the subject to the three others and so calls their attention to certain things that they before long find themselves, and confess it to him and to each other, affected too in the sense he communicates. To be perfectly definite it seems to me I must have it that the marriage of Ralph and the elder daughter is definitely arranged and fixed for a tolerably near date; since I want the elder girl, "under the effect," to break off something, and there is nothing so good for her to break off as their engagement. The rupture of that, with R's apprehension of how and why it is coming and has come, is of course a silver nail of perfect salience; just as it is another, I see, that this catastrophe, or whatever one may call it, places Ralph and the younger girl face to face as they have not yet been placed. Their recognition of that, his at least, which is also a perception and a comprehension of hers, what has this, in its concreteness, but one more silver nail? What I see myself, at the same time, here concerned with is the question of the outward footing Ralph remains on, finds or makes possible, with the two other women etc. when the rupture developes and after it has occurred. I can't have it end the relation, everything so collapsing—so that there must be still grounds for the relation, and they must be strong and positive, or at least definite and presentable. I get something by the provision that the engagement has not been given out nor the marriage announced as to take place; which, meanwhile, is not at all natural unless some advantage not to be too lightly sacrificed is involved with their still superficially keeping on. This requires thinking of, but doesn't in the least defy handling; and indeed I think I get it at a stroke by the fact that they all cling to him, in a sort, even in spite of the malaise, by reason of the convenience proceeding from his means. Decidedly, yes, they must be, through disorders, extravagances, turpitudes or whatever, of the late head of the family, and vraisemblablement through like actualities on the part of the son who has succeeded him in the proprietorship of Drydown, they must be on a hollow and quaking pecuniary basis—which makes Ralph have to have money, even though this wasn't in the least a common felicity or luxury in the American world of that period. None the less were there some fortunes, without overstrain of the point, and in short I have only to make Ralph all disposed, very peculiarly disposed indeed and very particularly inspired and inwardly needing and wanting, to pay his way handsomely, to be the free-handed-from-over-the-sea relative of the house, in order to pick up whatever link might have seemed missing here, and make it serve my turn. He pays his way, he regales and "treats", right and left; and nothing can be more in the note of the time I give him the sense of than the extraordinary readiness he finds in everyone to profit by this, the want of delicacy and dignity, by our modern measure, in the general attitude toward pecuniary favours. The smaller still lives on the greater, the minor folk on the great, and Ralph literally sees himself, feels himself, enjoys in a manner feeling himself, figure verily as one of the great by his taste of this play of money-patronage that is open to him. There it is: if I get a clou d'argent by the rupture, in short, I get another, still another, by some "dramatic" demonstration of the fashion after which they are going in spite of their malaise to hold on to him as beneficiaries of a sort. Yes, yes, yes, I have it, I have it: the brother has borrowed money, borrowed it of him bravely, from the first; and the brother opposes the rupture of the marriage for fear that, a complete rupture thus also involved, he will have to pay up to his creditor, his so probably indignant creditor, in consequence of the changed situation. The other two women know this, and what it means for him; and then thereafter see that it needn't mean what they fear, what he fears, and isn't going to—for here I just get a sublime little silver nail in the fact that Ralph, comprehending this, beautifully seeing the way it may help him, quite seems to show on the contrary that he won't push his hand, won't expose their private gene; seeing what he can get for himself by not doing so. Doesn't he in fact even "lend" the brother more money, lend it after the very rupture, in order to reassure them and keep on with them and show he doesn't "mind" the breach on the part of the elder girl?—this all because it keeps him along and on the footing of his still possible relation with the younger. In plain terms mayn't one put it that he buys, pays for, in hard cash, the pursuance of his opportunity?—as well as put it that his "dramatic" assurance of this, with its readjustment of his footing, constitutes again a silver nail. (There's nothing, I think, that one must so keep before one as that at first he is made ever so much of—much more of than he could at all have hoped.)

Well then, there he is with the question of the marriage ended—as to which, let me catch myself up to remember, I shall have to give her a motive, a presentable ground, since it's ended by her act, which won't make it too anomalous on his part that relations with the house are kept up. I must have him, by the way, not "stay" with them—I see advantages and naturalnesses, facilitations of several sorts, in his not doing that, but, much rather, putting up at one of the inns of the day, or better still in a lodging in one of the old Westend streets. Why not let the young woman make it quite frank and outspoken—happy thought!—and say in so many words that she can't marry him because, heaven help her, she's afraid of him; just that, simply afraid of him, even if he (with his own malaise at this note) can't get out of her any why, when he challenges her, as in dignity and decency he must, for a reason. This much affects and impresses him—for there isn't in it, mind, the smallest hint or implication of its being through any jealousy of her sister, whom she doesn't so much as honour with a suspicion. (The sort of Cinderella quality, so to call it, of the younger one, to be shown as more or less felt by him.) The position thus taken with practical suddenness by his prospective bride is the first definite note, at all really sharp one, that he has to reckon with on the subject of the queerness that hangs, that may so well hang, about him; and it sets up thereby the beginnings of the great feeling that I want to impute to him. He thinks all the same, at first, he expects and apprehends, not with pleasure, however, that this attitude of hers won't be supported by her mother and her brother: the thing having taken place between themselves only, and quite abruptly; she striking him as acting by her own sudden impulse alone, and in a manner not at all to suit the others. They will overbear her, he imagines; her mother in particular will bring her round again and into line. He positively fears this even—so that his surprise is great, and his malaise even greater, when the mother, with a full opportunity, by this time, doesn't so much as speak to him on the subject. There must be a passage between them, him and the Mother, in which he wonderingly and observantly, watching now all symptoms and portents, as it were, waits for Mrs. So-and-So to speak, to broach the matter herself, to show him her knowledge of what her daughter has done. He must know, or must believe, that she has now the knowledge—this point having been treated between him and the daughter, as it were, in the scene of the rupture. He has of course to ask her if she throws him over with her mother's privity and approval, to which she replies that she doesn't, up to then, that she has broken down but then and there, but that now at once of course she will report herself, so to speak, to her mother. I see it must be the case that she is plain and honest, not at all tortuous or perfidious, and so far as calculating, why calculating quite boldly and confessedly, as to the material advantages accruing; and thereby the more eloquent as to the inward feeling she can't surmount when she renounces these advantages so flatly. Well, the point is, from all this, that our young man is waiting for the mother to express to him that he mustn't on his side take advantage of the girl's backing out, but insistently claim his right not to be so trifled with (the attitude of the family being that they are, for all their straitened means, great people themselves, greater truly than he, and with a greatness for him in the connection,) and is going on as if nothing has happened. He has expected from her, as in character, the information that she has dealt herself, and with the high maternal rigour that then prevailed, with the ridiculous child, whom she has thus reduced again to reason and docility. But nothing of that sort comes—the lady of Drydown not only doesn't break ground to him herself in that sense, but betrays to his now considerably excited imagination a fear that he will: which will be, truly, awkward, embarrassing and even "scaring" to her; so that what I seem to see happening is verily that when he thus watches her not speak, notes her as forbearing to for reasons of her own, he doesn't take her up on it, decides in fact not to, decides that the question is really had out between them without either of them so speaking, and only by his looking her very hard in the eye, and her so looking at him, and his keeping it up on this and her keeping it up on that. It simply drops thus, by its own force, the question of the marriage, and the fact that he doesn't have it out, and that she allows him, as by taking care, no opportunity to, constitutes another silver nail, likewise, of as good a salience as I could desire. There it is then, so far as that goes; and after I have dealt for an instant now with the question of what the brother's attitude also is in the connection, I see I shall have got what I was reaching out for considerably above, the particular thing taking, or having taken, place which must serve for me as the determinant of the phenomenon, the factor, I have settled to tackle. The "other fellow appears" to Ralph, and makes him ask himself why, contrary to all consistency or logic, the laws of the game, this extraordinary occurrence should take place. He feels it as portentous—feels it, I see, in a way altogether different from the way in which he felt it on the first great occasion; when it only uplifted and thrilled him, making him conscious of all his force—whereas it now disquiets and alarms him, makes him sound it for its logic and its reason; which he clearly enough interprets to himself. A difficult and intricate thread of exhibition here, but as fine and sharp as I require it if I only keep it so. It comes back to him, it comes over him, that he has freedom, and that his acting in independence, or at least acting with inevitability, has laid this trap for him—that he has deviated, and of necessity, from what would have happened in the other fellow's place and time. What would have happened is that he wouldn't have feared his prospective bride, he being the other fellow; and that thus he, Ralph, has done the other fellow a violence, has wronged the personality of the other fellow in him, in himself, Ralph, by depriving him of the indicated, the consonant union with the fine handsome desirable girl whom the 1820 man would perfectly and successfully have been in love with, and whom he would have kept all unalarmedly and unsuspiciously in love with him. Deviation, violation, practical treachery, in fact—that is what Ralph's production and his effect on the two women (the mother sharing so in the "off"-ness of her daughter) amounts to and represents for him, aggravated moreover by the interest taken in, the community of feeling enjoyed with, the younger girl—for whom, putting it in rough summary fashion, the other fellow wouldn't have cared a jot. I cling thus to, I work thus admirably, what I have called Ralph's insuperable and ineffaceable margin of independence, clinging taint of modernity—it being by his fine modern sense that the exquisite, the delicate, the worthy-herself-to-be-modern younger girl has affected him, in utter defiance of any capacity on the other fellow's part to appreciate or conceive any such value in her. Off in his inscrutable fact of being and of action the other fellow then has had too his insuperable margin of antiquity, as opposed to modernity, his independent sensibility, though of a simpler and ruder, a harsher and heavier sort; and it is as a hovering messenger of this that my young man has, so to put it, drawn him down upon him. There it is—I get so my cause of my effect; I get my fact that the other party to the agreed—to experience turns up, all unexpectedly, all "alarmingly" to my party after a fashion to show that violence, that injury, as above formulated, has been done him, and as a protest against its being done further. I mustn't have this fact, I see, as repetitive, mustn't cheapen it with recurrence; must only have it, I seem to grasp, take place three times, each time with its own weight of meaning for that time, and then not take place again. It becomes thus each time a clou d'argent of the very sharpest salience. I see the first time as what one may call a warning. I see the second—taking place after Ralph has told the younger girl of what has happened, and what must take place between them on it has taken place—I see that as a retribution, or in other words as a thumping, a tremendous aggravator of malaise; and I see the third as something which I will state in a minute after having said a word more about the second. The second constitutes—by which I mean the occasion of it does——a reflection of the intimacy, or at least the beautifully good understanding, with the younger girl, determined for Ralph by his opening himself to her after the sensation, just above formulated, proceeding from the rupture and the way the two other women have acted about it. It's only at this moment, and from this moment, that she becomes his confidante, all the difference being made by that; and don't I see it as an enormous little fact that whereas he goes on in silence, as it were, with the others (putting the two men out of the question, which is a point to be treated separately,) he finds her in no ignorance, either real or pretended, but welling up, virtually, with readiness to let him see that she knows. She knows—and I think he doesn't even quite understand why or how she knows; her possession of what she does know striking him as a matter beyond, in its "quality", any communication of it that the others may have been capable of making her. The passage between them representing all this becomes then the determinant of what I have called the retributive, as distinguished from the merely warning, reappearance of the other party. I just want to tuck in here provisionally, and before breaking off for the day, that I hold tight the "motive", the dramatic value, of the third reappearance; which resides in my heroine's relation to it—that is not, definitely not, in her having it at all herself, that is not at all directly, but in her becoming aware of his having it and, as it were, catching him in the act of the same. Work this out, express this better, or at least entirely, in my next go: I perfectly see it—it only wants clear statement.

I want the business just glanced at, in the four or five foregoing lines, to be as ideally right of course as it can possibly be made; want to squeeze all the effective virtue out of it, in the sense of my generally intended colour and tone, generally intended production of the "new" frisson, as artfully as can be managed. Focussing on it a bit I seem to catch the tip of the tail of the right possibility—though on further thought indeed I am pulled up a little, not being sure it can't be bettered. For I was thinking a moment that she should, after all, have herself the direct apprehension, perception or, speaking plainly, vision; have it in the sense that she exhibits herself to R. at a given moment as plunged in stupefaction or confusion by having apparently seen him in double, that is seen him, been sure of him, in a place where, in the conditions gone into or examined and discussed between them, he couldn't possibly have been. In other words she has it to tell him—that to her perception as well, by her experience of it the hour ago or whatever, he rose before her for certain moments in a reality with which everything proves in conflict. That, I say, was what a minute since glimmered upon me—Ralph's having it from her as the form of what I call in this connection my third big determinant. But no, but no: what is immeasurably better than that he should have anything of the sort through herself is that she shall have it all absolutely through him. Pressing harder and more intelligently, I come back to the image, the so obviously finest, of her catching him under the squeeze, under the dire apprehension, of this third occasion—which I seem to see I can make adequate and operative by her recognising him, just that, after the right fashion, as doing his damnedest not to show her, not to betray to her, his intelligence of what he has to infer from, to read into, seeing it in an awful light, something that has just befallen him. It seems to me that I get it and give it, for my best interest, by our having it all in the form in which her taxing him with being in a state, a state that she divines, yet but only half understands, determines his at last more or less abjectly confessing to. He breaks down under the beautiful pity of her divination, the wonder of her so feeling for him that she virtually knows, or knows enough; and the question is here of course, isn't it? whether for full lucidity of interest, full logic of movement, he doesn't let her know all or, in vulgar fictional parlance, reveal his secret. That's what it comes to, what it has to come to, very much indeed it would seem; that's what the situation would seem to mean, would appear to have to give, as who should say, of finest: their being face to face over all the prodigious truth—which I think there ought to be a magnificent scène à faire in illustration of. The beauty, the pathos, the terror of it dwells thus in his throwing himself upon her for help—for help to "get out", literally, help which she can somehow give him. The logic, the exquisite, of this to be kept tight hold of, with one's finger on every successive link of the chain. But voyons un peu the logic; which, expressed in the plainest, the most mathematical terms possible, is that what this "retributive" admonition signifies for him is, he feels, that he is going to be left, handed over to the conditions of where and what and above all when he is; never saved, never rescued, never restored again, by the termination of his adventure and his experience, to his native temporal conditions, which he yearns for with an unutterable yearning. He has come to have his actual ones, the benighted, the dreadful ones, in horror—and he just lets her know how horrible everything that surrounds her, everything that she herself is surrounded with and makes part of, have become for him, and under what a weight of despair he sinks if what has just again for the third time happened to him means that his fate is sealed. He breaks down to her, has the one outward, the one communicated despair that I see for him in the course of the affair; his throwing himself upon her for what she can do to avert that doom, his beseeching her, all selfishly, to help him. I say all selfishly for the dramatic, clumsily so to call it, value, working value, of this; connected, identical, as it is with his readiness, in fact his intense hope of being able to, profit by the idea of a liberation for him purchased on her part by some sacrifice—sacrifice, by no means sufficiently, of any hope of him, but of the very stuff of herself, and this up to the hilt. The more I look into this, the more I see in it; but with proportionately much therefore to be stated about it with a supreme lucidity. Reduced to its simplest expression the case stands that he has fallen in love with her—done so in absolute rebound from the distress that her sister's, her mother's, breach has brought to an end for him; leaving him originally to throw himself so much on her by reaction, by already acquired and assimilated sense that with her, too blessedly, almost any ease for him, whether but comparatively or absolutely, is possible. Thus had he given way to his having, as who should say, fallen in love with her; and thus does that fact work, to his perception, both toward his prime relief and toward his understanding of what he has to fear. Here I come to something pretty intricate and difficult, yet full of life and force, say frankly of beauty, if I can get it straight; which is what I must proceed to. Why has what passes, what has passed up to then, between this pair, why does it bring on or draw down the third, the "retributive" recurrence? Well, let us see if we don't make out, and thereby but store up still more beauty and intensity. Put it simply for the moment that the Predecessor has been in love with the elder sister while, all unknowably (at the time,) the younger has been in love with him. That condition on her part, it appears to me, gives the link I want, the exact one, for what Ralph finds of prepared, as it were, of reciprocal, of ground laid, for his first understandings with her when once he has begun to feel the interfering malaise of the others. I am here, I quite recognise, brought up against the question of why if the Predecessor has been so in love, then and there, in the old time, he should have had this impulse to swing off into conditions so remote from those of the object of this sentiment. I get partly in answer to this the fact that Ralph, shown as so much in love in the first Book, has all the same embraced his opportunity to swing off into where we now have him; but I want something more than this, and I don't get it by simply leaning strongly on the attachment inspired in the man of 1820; inasmuch as the more he has been attached the more explaining will the matter take, the matter flowering into that inordinate phenomenon of the original nocturnal meeting of the two men. If I give full value to the idea that the present Pendrel's pressure, his hovering, penetrating force has had much the most to do with what has taken place, that though the man of 1820 has drawn the man of 1910, exact, (though as to this I must make no modern date explicit of that) back into his own age, while the latter has drawn the former forward into his, though I do this, I take care, I soigner the effect that Ralph has begun it, has exerted the original force, has been the determinant for the other and thrust at him his opportunity. This in a general way clears up a little the particular aspect of the case that I am turning over; but don't I still nevertheless want something more than that? I want something that the predecessor may affect Ralph as definitely uttering to him and direfully reproaching him with; and perhaps as I dig into my material and insist on gouging what I want out of it I meet this ground of resentment and reprobation for the predecessor that he feels, or rather that Ralph feels him to feel—for it can all only be imputation on R's part—that he isn't, as it were, playing the game; ceases quite to play it from the moment that he inspires the elder girl, whom one had hit it off so with dans le temps, with the alarm of distress and dislike that has operated for her rupture. I find something in that, I find I think enough in that—find it enough that Ralph recognises himself as under displeasure, under vindictive displeasure for not, as it were, playing the game. Let me make him put it for himself that the other man doesn't play the game either, from the moment that he thus "comes in", reappears, as it were, as with the conscious purpose so to "brouiller" things. Have it clear that Ralph has no theory at all of what his double's situation is off in his sphere; put it that he is by way of having no sort of constructive or inferential or divinatory notion of that at all: which it would make an extraordinary complication to undertake to give him—by which I mean an impossible one, an unspeakable tangle, within the limits, altogether. Yes, yes; the more I think the more I seem to see this conception of Ralph's to be that the other fellow is endangered and incommoded in his sphere by what strikes him as R's practical perfidy and non-accomplishment. What makes this is that the two women, the two other men etc., and the object of his preference above all, are thereby handed over to their intensity of malaise—I give Ralph as seeing and feeling and understanding him as rendered thereby vindictive, as convicting him accordingly of "perfidy", and of decreeing the punishment which shall consist of not coming to his help: as I must show it as having figured in their original entente that each shall come au besoin to the help of the other. Out of this little store of indications, at any rate, I shall be able surely to help myself to whatever in the connection, and in closer quarters, I find my best interest in.