Chapter X: Part 10

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.

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.