. . We are going to dine again at the Embassy to-day--with a very ill
will on my part. All well. I hope when I write next I shall report
myself in better cue. . . . I have had a tremendous outpouring from
Jeffrey about the last part, which he thinks the best thing past,
present, or to come."[140] Three more days and I had the MS. of the
completed chapter, nearly half the number (in which as printed it stands
second, the small middle chapter having been transposed to its place).
"I have taken the most prodigious pains with it; the difficulty,
immediately after Paul's death, being very great. May you like it! My
head aches over it now (I write at one o'clock in the morning), and I
am strange to it. . . . I think I shall manage Dombey's second wife
(introduced by the Major), and the beginning of that business in his
present state of mind, very naturally and well. . . . Paul's death has
amazed Paris. All sorts of people are open-mouthed with admiration. . . .
When I have done, I'll write you _such_ a letter! Don't cut me short
in your letters just now, because I'm working hard. . . . _I_'ll make
up. . . . Snow--snow--snow--a foot thick." The day after this, came the
brief chapter which was printed as the first; and then, on the 16th,
which he had fixed as his limit for completion, the close reached me;
but I had meanwhile sent him out so much of the proof as convinced him
that he had underwritten his number by at least two pages, and
determined him to come to London. The incident has been told which soon
after closed his residence abroad, and what remained of his story was
written in England.

I shall not farther dwell upon it in any detail. It extended over the
whole of the year; and the interest and passion of it, when to himself
both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold
of him, and more powerfully affected him, than had been the case in any
of his previous writings, I think, excepting only the close of the _Old
Curiosity Shop_. Jeffrey compared Florence to little Nell, but the
differences from the outset are very marked, and it is rather in what
disunites or separates them that we seem to find the purpose aimed at.
If the one, amid much strange and grotesque violence surrounding her,
expresses the innocent, unconsciousness of childhood to such rough ways
of the world, passing unscathed as Una to her home beyond it, the other
is this character in action and resistance, a brave young resolute h