Front matter (continued 6)

Definite it is then that, caught by his young friend in the fact of his intelligent alarm he makes a clean breast to her of what he feels and understands, of what his intelligence most helps him to, of what, in a word, it is necessary that she shall know—know in order to assist and relieve him, do the particular thing that will so act for him: and so bring the whole situation to the point of its dénoûment. What is then this particular thing?—what can it be when I bring it down to a finer point, that is bring the question down, than my general first notion brought it to? Here the very closest and finest logic must govern all one's sequences. Altogether important and indispensable is it that he doesn't "confess to her", really appeal and throw himself upon her, till she has so "caught", as I say, and cornered him, that there is nothing else for him to do—that is that under the pity and perception and beauty of this he absolutely can't but give in. I have provided above, or sought to, for the motive force establishing in her this capacity—I have sought to do so, I repeat, though I'm not sure I don't still feel a little uncomfortable at being able to do nothing better for her, as would appear, than simply recognise his woe. The beautiful thing would be for her to be able to refer this woe to some particular, some portentous observation or constatation already made by him: which question I examined and turned over above without breaking down my objection to her directly sharing his vision: I at that point stated that I wished her but indirectly, but derivatively, to do that—through her apprehension of the state into which it has put him. I seem to feel that this then isn't quite ideally adequate or good without I know not what more for her: the ability in her, say, to challenge him first on some entirely concrete matter which has told her something for herself, something strange and prodigious, or at least deeply mystifying, in advance of the pressure brought to bear by her on him as an indicated, approved, a revealed sufferer, the pressure in fine that makes him break down. The trouble is that so I swing back again this way to too near the objection-ability, and thereby ask myself if there isn't a way out, a happy thought, in making her, instead of seeing something more than the normal, making her, as I have used the term, "catch", catch in the fact, something in excess of it, see something less, have the queerness of missing something—her miss of which needs to be explained. The miss, as I call it, corresponds and matches with his exposure to the retributive visitation, as I have called it; and something glimmers out for me in the way of the very occurrence itself, the fact of the visitation for him being marked, marked startlingly and mystifyingly to her, not by his experience as in any degree detected by her, discernible to her, but by his apparent exclusion from any experience; or in other words by an inexplicable lapse or suspension of his state of being at all. I think that if I can arrange that—her not finding him present when by all the laws and the logic of life he should be present, and so having to challenge him for an explanation—in short I believe I do so see something. He is extinguished for her senses by being in the grip of his face-to-faceness with the other man; and don't I make it out as arrangeable that this takes place in the very fact of his having appointed a tryst or rendezvous with her, at which she has found him, but in the midst of which he then astoundingly fails and, as it were, evaporates? I seem to see something like her having gone out to him by appointment, at dusk of evening, in the Square, the enclosed square itself; where as she approaches she has recognised him within, has even spoken to him through the rails, while he awaits her, and there has had an exchanged word or two with her, directing her round to the gate: which she reaches and enters the enclosure by only to become sure, after moments and moments and moments of surprise and stupefaction, that he is definitely not there. I think I have it, it is then; it is at these moments, I mean during them, and under the "influence" exactly, upon the other man, of the appointment given her, that the "retributive visitation" takes place. So I get it, get it enough, get in fact all I need. The visitation over he is in the place again: he is there before her and what more natural "challenge" can I have for her than her alarmed question, that is her stupefied one, as to what in the world had during those moments, which I can make as long or as short, for intensity, as I like, what in the name of unanswerable wonder had become of him. He is there before her again, but before her with what has happened to him overwhelmingly marked upon him.

I see what then takes place between them as a virtual counterpart, in the way of his telling his story, to his scene with the Ambassador, the whole contents of Book III; only all in the note of his depression, his unspeakable homesickness for his own time and place—whereas the other whole passage had been in the note of his elation, eagerness and confidence. He makes, as I say, a clean breast to her—as he had made it under the then essential restriction to the Ambassador; with the immense difference, however, that whereas the effect in the latter case was to impress his then confidant with his being out of his mind, the present effect is, marvellously, prodigiously, to make our heroine believe in the truth of his extraordinary case, recognise how he puts it to her so because he is, because he has remained, exactly so sane, and that it is (prodigiously, marvellously as the force in her to do so may be on her part) to his sanity, exactly, to his convincing consistency, that she rallies. This rallying of hers is of course the very point, for interest and beauty, for the climax of the romantic hocuspocus, of my sought total effect; the very flower, so to speak, of what I noted a little back as my scène à faire. As I have already said repeatedly enough, he tells her all, tells her all, all, all; which involves of course his telling her what he feels, has come to feel, in his being so "cut off", so now conclusively and hopelessly cut off, from the life, from the whole magnificent world from which he is truant, unless something, something she perhaps can think of, may yet save him. His whole position becomes thus the plea to be saved, to be liberated—with his waiting on her devotion, her affection, her ingenuity, in a word her inspiration, somehow to let him off. All sorts of things to be done with this, in the beautiful and curious and interesting way, especially with the idea that she is sole among those of his actual life whom contact with him, the relation with him, doesn't now make "afraid". Of course this absence of fear on her part has to be based, has to have its own logic in order to have all its beauty; and when one asks oneself why she, why she only, thus extraordinarily, one seems both at once to be reduced for support, for illumination of it to the fact that she loves him, and that her affection can do it, and to the concomitant recognition that it will, that it must, serve. For it is what exactly and immediately supplies to the situation between them the idea of her being able to operate somehow or other by sacrifice, her sacrifice, and of herself and her affection and her interest, somehow or other; so far as one doesn't make her interest, her interest in how to do it, by its very intensity and, so to speak, curiosity, an inspiring motive. I must have had him put it to her straight, How, how, how can you get me off, can you release me from this apprehension of having really lost all I feel and fear I've lost?—so that thus she has to throw herself back upon herself under pressure of this dire appeal which involves, obviously, her using everything. For it would seem to me kind of sublime that he now, at last now, opening up, opening out, everything that he has had before to keep back, tells her such things about those fruitions of the Future which have constituted his state, tells her of how poor a world she is stuck fast in compared with all the wonders and splendours that he is straining back to, and of which he now sees only the ripeness, richness, attraction and civilisation, the virtual perfection without a flaw, that she stands dazzled before it and can only be shut up in the heartbreak of remaining so far back behind it, so dismally and excludedly out of it, while he, with her assistance, shaking her off after he has, as it were, used her, wins his way back to it and out of her sight and sense for ever. Immense and interesting to show him as profiting by her assistance without his being thereby mean or abject or heartless; in which light my affair can't afford, given the whole romantic note of it, to place him. Besides the "psychological" truth and consistency here may back me to any extent. The great question is then of her "assistance", how it's rendered, what it consists of, how he can take it from her and how she can give it. I feel that my subject contains the exact, the exquisite rightness for this deep in its breast, if only I watch hard enough to see said rightness emerge—emerge as it were of itself and as from the operation of what surrounds it. It dwells somehow deep in the fact, the great dramatic fact of the whole business, that she alone hasn't had the mistrust, the malaise and the fear; in connection with which I seem to see something of no small, in fact of the greatest, pop out at me. If he has made her his full "confession" don't I make out that, to balance this, she also tells him about herself something of the last intimacy—not merely how she loves him, but something better still than that?—don't I in fact find myself just leaping and snatching at the idea which answers all my questions of procedure and has my perfect solution just locked up and waiting within it? What is more than her confessing to him that she loves him, what gives the exhibitional further twist I was groping for, is that she tells him she has loved the man he is a substitute for, the man of 1820, the real one of that actual year, and that in loving himself she has but obeyed the irresistible continuity and consistency involved in his force of representation. I seem to see really my ideal rightness in this—but must keep my head to state here what I see, for my perfect use, roundabout it. I have already spoken, far above, of her having loved the other man, the "real" one, and done so as by the implication that Ralph knows it, is in possession of it, and has seen for himself what an identity and what a connection reside in it. By what means, however, has he originally known it, learnt it, got into possession of it?—unless by one of the others' having stated it to him. I ask myself which then of the others—but only at once to recognise the matter as already determined for me by what I have threshed out. He gets the knowledge effectively and, as I call it, dramatically, to all intents and purposes scenically, by the fact that the little H.W. man, as I call him, betrays the wanted jealousy of him from the moment the elder girl breaks off from him. Up to that moment not, but after it, and on his turning to the younger, with whom the little H.W. man is, as I have shown, himself in love, then entirely. This jealousy is practically what leads to his profession of the truth; so that there can be no question of his needing it from her—he so reads it in her manière d'être—up to the time of, and the great revolution constituted by, the scène à faire. What we get thus is her manière d'être for him, all sufficient, all infinitely touching, before that scène, and her condition and her action after the same; which are two quite different things. Then, I mean in this latter case, her avowal, the only entire and direct one, is quite a different thing; out of which I have to pull, as I say, quite what I want. She has loved the man of 1820 all in himself—keep every shade of discrimination here flawlessly clear. She has loved him wholly without reward of course, and even under his more than indifference, his degree of contempt; entirely addressed as he was, and has been, to her elder sister. Yet I pull up too here, in the midst of my elation—though after a little I shall straighten everything out—to see that I introduce an element of confusion in trying to work the matter out as if anything can have preceded Ralph's own, Ralph's "conscious" arrival. Awfully important, and not a little difficult, here, not to let any tangle or any embroilment lay its insidious trap. Doesn't Ralph know by his own experience, if he takes up the action from the moment, and the moment only, of "arriving", arriving for the first time, all that has happened for his predecessor and exactly what hasn't? There, however, I gasp with relief, is a question that would be embarrassing to me only if, on intenser reflection, I didn't see that I exactly haven't pretended that he doesn't repeat, repeat up to a certain point, the experience of the young man of the portrait? Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be scared, by a momentarily—confused appearance or assumption that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does; without which where is definitely that Past, that made and achieved, that once living and enacted Past which is the field of his business? He deflects in the midst of it, yes, by the uncontrollability of his modernism—that is, at least, by what was incalculable beforehand, the exhibition of the way in which "they" were going to take it. The whole effect of my story is exactly his disconcerted and practically defeated face-to-faceness with the way in which they do take it—a matter, a fact, an appearance, that gives me all I want for accounting for his deflection. Thus is our having, his having, everything en double regulated and exhibited: he is doing over what the other fellow has done (though it acts for the other persons in it as if it were the first time—this quite all right, though not looking so at first)—and that accordingly hangs together and stands firm. Therefore accordingly my start, a little above, at being what I there for a moment called disconcerted and defeated was groundless: I was going on perfectly straight and right—and am now doing so again. To repeat, accordingly, I get my full right to deal as by a free hand with that little historic truth of the girl's concealed sentiment for the other fellow, accompanied with her equal consciousness that he doesn't and can't and won't care for her a bit: at least in the same way. This revolution that has taken place for her—and well before the scène—of Ralph's differing so from the 1820 man—in short, in short. Note what occurs to me as to the question or no of whether the portrait, the portrait in the house in 1910, is done from Ralph in 1820 or not, done from Ralph himself, or accounted for, as coming into existence afterwards. The thing, at this ragged edge, is to keep hold of the clue, as tight as possible, that I have grabbed for my solution in the line of her making the sacrifice; making it all with a sublime intelligence for him, on account of what he has told her of his own epoch—which she stares at in her deprivation.

To clear up a little the page preceding this, instead of doing it over, I was making a statement, a bit arrested, as to the revolution that has taken place in the girl, previous, well previous, to the scene of the great crisis, as to the attitude toward her of her sister's fiancé, from the moment she feels, exquisitely and almost incredulously feels, that difference in him (toward her) which has been more completely defined since her sister's dismissal of him, and which gives her, as well as it gives him, a liberty never yet enjoyed by her. I shall presently come back to the rest of this, the enormous value to be got out of it; but I want not simply to brush by the small hare started yesterday by that sudden remembrance of the question of the portrait, the portrait figuring, or having figured, so extraordinarily to Ralph upwards of a century after its being painted; and which it would seem I must do something about. I see a chance to play with it, with the 1820 production of it, for illustration and intensification of my most-sought effect. It's an excrescence perhaps upon the surface I have already in this rough fashion plotted out; which remark, however, is nonsense, as nothing is an excrescence that I may interestingly, that I may contributively, work in. It gives me moreover, the idea I begin to clutch the tip of the tail of, it gives me another person whom I suddenly see as a great enhancement for my action; the painter-man who gets, doesn't one fancy? into a much straighter and closer "psychologic" and perceptive and mystified and mixed relation with his remarkable subject than any of the others in their way do. I get the painter-man as affected in his way too with the famous malaise, and the more affected with his proportionately greater opportunities, as it were, if not of observation at least of a kind of wondering and penetrating consideration. It "kind of" glimmers upon me that there would be something good, something much to the purpose, in having the painter-man begin to prepare the turn the situation takes, having him start the question of what the matter is (crudely speaking) with the genial young man, after all, and below and outside of his geniality; so that his wonderment, his felt queerness and queernesses, are inevitably communicated by him and sow the seed of the rest of what I want. They sow above all, don't they, or mayn't they be made to? the seed of Ralph's suspicion of his being suspected, putting him on his guard against this latter, rendering him uneasy, and whatever else, under the painter's study of him. Wouldn't it be then to the little H.W. man that the artist speaks of his strange impression, in complete confidence and secrecy at first, but sowing what I have called the seed so in the most favourable ground? I recognise that one doesn't quite see how we know he does this, as we don't of course see or hear him do it; yet that needn't find itself so ill provided for by Ralph's himself making it out and concluding upon it—which is after all the only way we really know anything. I don't want to repeat what I have done at least a couple of times, I seem to remember, and notably in The Liar—the "discovery", or the tell-tale representation of an element in the sitter written clear by the artist's projection of it on canvas. At the same time I am not afraid; I see its office well enough and needn't trouble if once the idea appeals, as I think it really does. In this case it's worked in early; the notion of my young man having his portrait as a matter of course done in London coming in with perfect naturalness. He has it done for his prospective bride; she takes an interest in it of the very greatest at first; and it is the little H.W. man who recommends, who selects, the artist. I see all sorts of curious things in this—it perfectly bristles with them, and with one's chance, above all, of making the personage in question (and I do want another figure, to people the canvas a little more) a real vision to Ralph, a character of the time, intensely typical for Ralph; through whose sense of all which, however, I tread the delicate ground of imputations to him, of perceptions, discriminations, estimates more or less at variance with his 1820 identity. That delicate ground, I have only to remind myself, is absolutely the very most attaching ground of my process; solvitur ambulando—I have only to find myself in close quarters with it to get from it force and felicity. I present then the painter-man, I make him, do him, see him and use him; use him to very good purpose. Don't I kind of see Ralph's suspicion of being suspected come to a head in the sight of something produced on the little H.W. man's part, on his nerves and in his fancy, in fine, through an active correspondence with the malaise the artist has caused in him through divinably feeling it himself? The foregoing difficult to state, but one is quite possessed of it; there's a great lot in it—only too much, alas, given my faculty for amplifying and going far. However, a rigorous tight hand on the excess of that is my very law of life here. I do feel how an effective further twist or two hangs about the question of the portrait. We get it surely as painted full face on—with the rendered face, in other words, that is turned away from Ralph's 1910 vision of him on that night in the house. Yes, he sits for it in 1820; he sees it grow, he sees and feels what grows out of it—I really don't see why the fact of it, the high conceit of it, mayn't do for me a good deal of my work. It plays a part in the situation—though I must square the difficulty of the artist "feeling about his sitter" as he more and more does and yet being able to keep his method and process, his application of his ability, well in hand, in order to put the thing through. It's a fine thing, a very fine one—I need it as that; for the finer it is the more it plays its part in the state of sensibility, all round, at which we increasingly assist. The thing is done for the prospective bride—though she would have been much more likely to have been treated to a fine miniature (alas, but no matter!) And don't I see that the first stroke in the reaction, on her part, as I may conveniently call it, is her abrupt, her sudden inconsequent refusal of the gift? in which she is backed by her mother. Perhaps she refuses it even before it is quite finished—for I want the artist to have spoken about it to the little H.W. man, so to put it, while the work is still in progress; which is also the time of the latter's opening himself about it (as Ralph "makes out") to the two women. Here I have something—the picture's having been destined for the big panel over the principal drawing-room—whereas the place in which my hero finds it in 1910 is the small inner retreat which I have handled in Book II. The mother and daughter startle Ralph, in 1820, by their expression of unwillingness to its hanging where it was intended; but as I want it still on the premises, want some compromise or right thing done about it, so that it shall be there for 1910, I see as arrangeable the business, the tension, the whole significant passage, of its being relegated to the place where everyone concerned will least see it—short of its being turned out of the house; a circumstance I don't invoke. I have it there for the other man, as his own portrait, when he is restored to his time by Ralph's liberation from it; I have it there because I want him in it, don't you see? for that wonder over it in which Ralph is held during his night of 1910. The other man comes back, the other man is in it, in order to carry out his part—well, of what I have recorded.

The "sacrifice", the indispensable, unspeakable sacrifice, on the girl's part, is involved in her relation to Ralph as she now knows him, and the quintessential "drama" of it, so to speak, is by the same token involved in his knowing her as she knows him, and as, above all, she is known by him. There hovers before me a something-or-other in this, a finer twist still, a deeper depth or higher flight of the situation, which seems worth looking into, and which in fact already appears to open out a good bit before me as I consider it. Isn't there something, isn't there even much, in the idea that when once these two have arrived, so to speak, at their understanding, at their mutual disclosures, or at least, that is, at his disclosure and her avowal, he becomes capable of a sort of sublimity in presence, as who should say, of her own? so that there is a kind of struggle between them as to who shall give up most—if I may put it in such a way without excess of the kind of romanticism that I don't want; wanting as I do above all, constantly kept hold of and economised, never let go of nor perverted in the least, the unfailing presence, drawing in everything to itself, of that force of "tone" which makes the thing of the parenté of the "Screw". So much is true and absolute; but doesn't prevent that I am wanting to put my finger on the very centre of the point from which my young man's "liberation" is worked. What hovers before me at this pitch, as I just said, is the concetto that, sincerely affected by her sublimity, he is moved to match it—and in all sincerity as I say—by offering to remain with her, as who should say, give up everything for her—from the moment he thus takes in that she gives him up for what is to herself utterly nothing, nothing but the exaltation of sacrifice—in short what I see! I have it all, I possess it here, and now must give pause to this long outciphering. It seems to give me after all a fourth recurrence of the man of 1820, called back, as it were, by what takes place. I possess it, I hold it fast; simply noting the prime point in regard to my last Book. Rather good and fine, I think, to make it that as the man of 1820 is "called" (since I think I do definitely give him his re-intervention here, though probably at the cost of still keeping these down to three in number, and so running two of the others, as who should say, into one,) so the woman of 1910 is likewise called; so my fundamental idea that the solution of the solution comes about through Aurora's "coming out, coming over", takes effect as I had planned it. The penultimate book ends on the climax I have in mind, as the "Ambassador" Book ended and broke off with the two at the door of the House; and so the ultimate one puts Ralph, always in London, and after the lapse of the real six months or whatever, face to face with his friend of Book I, to whom exactly what was foreshadowed in that Book for my dénoûment had happened. Things, things for her consciousness, her imagination, her growing unrest, her own New York malaise, have happened to her too; just how we are to know about them giving me, however, a little knot rightly to untie. I hate its being a "little" knot, savouring so of the perfunctory and the abbreviated; yet how can I want it in the nature of things to do more than adequately balance with the dimensions, or whatever, of Book First? The question is how, with the right sort of beauty of effect, to work in together the Ambassador's re-participation and her own, or rather, better put, hers and the Ambassador's own; since I of course, under penalty of the last infamy, stick here still, as everywhere, to our knowing these things but through Ralph's knowing them. It's a bit awkward that I seem to want Aurora's arrival in London and her appeal to the Ambassador for assuagement of her literal climax of trouble, I seem to want that passage to precede my young man's reappearance, re-emergence, so to speak—and yet can't possibly have anything so artistically base. I want the "rescue", on this side of time, by Aurora, as the liberation, for rescue on the other side of time, has been by the girl of 1820; I want it to be, on our actual ground, by something that Aurora does; I want his restoration and recovery to take place actually and literally through her having got into such a "psychic" state, passed through such a psychic evolution, over there, that she takes action at last, takes the very action that she sort of defied Ralph to make her take in that full, and would-be at least so rich, "scene" of the most preliminary order. What there took place essentially was, as he formulated it, that she would look at none but a man of, as it were, tremendous action and adventure, not being appealed to (however she might attenuate or sophisticate her arrangement of her case) by the "mere" person, the mere leader, of the intellectual life, the mere liver in a cultivated corner, that Ralph has admitted himself to be to her—with a frankness, an abjection, say, that his whole subsequent adventure represents his reaction against. The immense scope his reaction has found then, once he has got over into the "old world", this has developed to the point that no prodigious adventure of any such figure as she may have had in mind comes within millions of miles of the prodigy of his adventure; whereby my conceit is that all the while he is "having" this, all the while she, left to the aftersense of what has passed between them, gradually feels her "state of mind", state of feeling, state of fancy, say, state of nerves in fine, grow and grow (in a sort of way that is corresponding all the while to the stages of his experience) till the pitch of unsupportable anxiety and wonder is reached for her, and being able no longer to stand it, she comes out to London. I make her come to London through considerations, references or whatever, plausible enough; and I make her by the same token want to see the Ambassador—whom she approaches, after the very fashion of Ralph's approach six months or whenever, before, and as if he were almost, so to say, a father-confessor. All this is feasible and "amusing", rather beautiful to do being what I mean; only it must come after and by reference backward, so to call it—as I can only make the Ambassador precede her in these renewals, for Ralph, of contact and apprehension. It isn't so much making him aware of the Ambassador first, so to speak, that is the trouble, and making him then aware of Aurora by that personage and what comes of reference on his part to the beautiful uneasy and inquiring creature of New York; it isn't so much the scene with that young woman herself then taking place: it isn't these that put their question to me, but the terms and conditions on and in which I have his Excellency and his young friend of the previous season confronted. What a blessing thus to find, accordingly, how the old gentle firmness of pressure, piously applied, doesn't fail to supply me. Our young friend is in the house again as he was in it in Book II—the only little hitch being that I didn't show him as living there, for the Ambassador, in Book III. He goes to live there, goes with that escort to do so on the last page of the Book, but by that very fact to pass into—well everything that we have seen him in and which represents the rupture of continuity with the Ambassador's period. So in short, perfectly, I see that, for consummate reasons, he can't receive this visitor on that exhausted scene at all, but must have the case otherwise—have it in fact just as it comes to me now. The Ambassador, after his visit from Aurora (which we don't know about yet, don't know about till Ralph has his knowledge of it from him,) goes then, walks then, the day and the season being fine and he walking with the largeness with which dear J. R. L. used to walk—he goes then, I say, to the place where he has last had sight of his so interestingly demented young man of said previous season: he goes there but to have the sensation, by which I mean of course the actual experience, of seeing the very conditions in which he then parted with him practically renewed. The last thing he had stood there on the pavement before the house to see was Ralph's going in with that last look at him and with the open door duly again closing on him. So accordingly the first thing he now sees is Ralph's coming out again with the door closing on him from behind and the first look the young man addresses to the world of 1910 resting exactly upon the confidant of his former embroilment. I like that—like Ralph's coming straight out of everything we have been having, everything up to the very last sharp edge of it, straight back into this friend's hands. Well, how do I take up, that is how does Ralph take up, and how does the Ambassador, this fresh situation and relation? The Ambassador, after his passage with the so handsome and so distracted young woman from New York, may well have some doubt and some question as to how, and be in some predicament about it; but I grant at once that Ralph has emerged from all trouble and now is, for the whole situation, supreme master and controller. He is "all right" at least, and he re-connects, on the spot, with all the lucidity and authority we can desire of him. His distinguished friend has come, clearly, on a visit to him—and he embraces that as well as he embraces their not going back into the house. At the previous season, as I have called it, he wasn't yet living in the house, he was only visiting it from his hotel or his lodgings; yet it isn't to these, none the less, that I see him invite his caller to adjourn with him, but, under the happiest inspiration, straight into the Square itself, very pleasant now to sit in (I must rightly and neatly adjust together the times of the year) and in which, under its ancient form, by which I mean of course its earlier, he has been through the scène à faire of 1820. It strikes me as positively "pretty" that they go into the Square together on the leafy June afternoon and that there it is, while they sit down, that the Ambassador reports to him of the visit received at the Embassy from Aurora. He has those things to tell—to tell to the young man who had those others to do the like with as presented in Book III; whereby it is very much he, or entirely he, who is the relator, reporter, exhibitor, with Ralph also for cross-questioner, as the Ambassador himself was on the other occasion—I myself having of course too my free hand for showing the elder man as really confessing to his genial bewilderment of interest. However, the extent to which I am possessed of this requires no dotting of "i's"; and the great point simply is that thus we get all we require, as a preliminary to the last pages of all of what has happened to or in, what has happened for and by, Aurora. I scarcely need state that the upshot or conclusion of the two men's talk is that Ralph must of course at once see that young woman; which is the understanding on which the Ambassador leaves him. But I am almost capable of wondering whether I had best give this meeting, this reunion of theirs, in the facts and in the flesh, as it were—so aloof do I feel from the possibility of a kind of graceless literality. I shall see, I shall make up my mind: it will come, in true rightness, it can come but so, when I get in close nearness to it. I do seem to conceive that I can beautifully get all my needed value for final climax from taking it all out, or putting it all in, between the two men—especially after they have come out of the Square together for the Ambassador to go, and they stand on the opposite pavement, the bit round the Square, with the house over there in view. Ralph of course has told his Excellency nothing; not a syllable of repetition of all that we've been having, of course, issues from him for his friend's illumination. He has only cross-questioned, only extracted everything about Aurora; only taken in how his triumph is complete and how that young woman has come down and round. It is thus a question then of his sending her a message, and of his sending it by the Ambassador for whom he sees her (justified thereto very vividly by the latter) simply and all so wonderingly wait. Yes, the message he sends is that he shall be glad to see her. He summons her to him—doesn't offer to go to her. He has said to his companion at first and for their going into the Square that he is not staying at the House, and that his lodgings are elsewhere. The Ambassador, taking the message, has the question, virtually: "She's to come then to you at your hotel?" On which, after an hesitation and resting his eyes a moment over on the house, Ralph says: "No, no. Over there." But I should say I needn't here and now draw this out, and that I have it all and more than all, were it not that I just want to note more emphatically that I provide for everything, provide against the need of any "small" scene with the young woman from New York as a sequence to this full passage with the Ambassador, and as a wind up to the whole thing, together with the balance of such a chapter against the preliminary Book First—I provide for everything, I say, by putting into this finale between the two men in the Square, by making Ralph acquaint his visitor with, so to speak, all the requisite meaning resident in the appeal, from their young woman, that his Excellency has called to report on. I said above that Ralph "tells" the Ambassador nothing—but only receives his own statement and cross-questions him on it; but that qualification refers only to what has been happening to R., in his prodigious alternate character, during the previous six months or whatever. Not a word about all that; but on the other hand every word required to enable us to dispense with another scene for the young woman from N.Y. On that subject Ralph is fully informing, and what I mean and want is that this action in him, holding his interlocutor extraordinarily interested, shall so suffice for our own interest and satisfaction, shall so vividly take the place of it, that we simply shan't in the least miss, but shall find ourselves admirably do without, any bringing "on" again of Aurora. The present and conclusive scene in the Square all sufficiently brings her on, all sufficiently prefigures Ralph's reunion, not to say union, with her, and in short acquits me of everything. A far more ingenious stroke, surely, and to be made more ministrant to effect and to the kind of note of the strange that I want than the comparatively platitudinous direct duo between the parties! He has only to give us in advance all that the duo must and will consist of in order to leave us just where, or at least just as, we want!