to my readers to be so fantastic as to
give the work at once a fictional character; they will say that on
some real lines I have constructed a romance of the wildest type,
and that Arthur is no longer an interesting personality, because as
a rule he is too ordinary to be ideal, in the last two chapters too
illusory to be real.

All I can urge is this: the chapters shall be their own defence. If I
had wished to present my readers with nothing but a dry chronicle of
facts I should have toned this down to something more prosaic. But
every one who has had any experience of life will know that her
surprises are sometimes very bewildering; that fiction is nothing but
uncommon experience made ordinary, or heaped inartistically upon a
single character.

It may be said that the man was mentally affected, in the latter
scene; in the former, that Arthur himself was the victim of a mental
disorder; but he left such vivid and detailed descriptions of both
events that I have been enabled to give one (the letter) exactly
as it stands, and the interview in Teheran is taken directly from
diaries--a little amplified and reconstructed, it is true, but only
when interpreted by the light of later events.

And this must be always the task of the true biographer; for the
biographer has to take a life _en masse_, and disentangling the
predominant and central threads, cast the rest away; in this process
rejecting facts and incidents whose isolated interest is often
greater than the interest of what he retains, because it is on the
latter that the pearls of life are, so to speak, strung.

In this case the two incidents I have kept are both so pregnant of
influence upon his later life, so necessary to the logical
development of his principles, that, in spite of their romantic, not
to say wild, character, I have retained them.

CHAPTER VII

About the middle of February, 1879, I was sitting at work in my
lodgings in Newman Street, when I was interrupted by the advent of my
landlady, to inform me that there was a gentleman below who wished to
see me. I told her to show him up, and she returned in a moment,
ushering in, to my extreme surprise, Arthur Hamilton. I confess I
hardly knew him at first. He had grown a beard, and looked thinner
and graver than he used to do. He had the same slow, almost stately
movement, with a slight and not ungraceful suggestion of languor;
his manner was somewhat changed, and very much improved; and he h