e conceived them. She
must have been blonde, surely, and with narrow flanks.... There are
moments when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader?
And I swear to you that such a moment came to me while Dolmetsch
mumbled the last two bars of that Mass. The notes were "do, la, sol,
do, fa, do, sol, la," and as he mumbled them I sat upright and stared
into space, for it had become suddenly plain to me why when people
talked of Tintoretto I always found myself thinking of Turgeneff.

I do not say that this story that I have told to you is a very good
story, and I am afraid that I have not well told it. Some day, when
I have time, I should like to re-write it. But meantime I let it
stand, because without it you could not receive what is upmost in my
thoughts, and which I wish you to share with me. Without it, what I
am yearning to say might seem to you a hard saying; but now you will
understand me.

There never was a writer except Dickens. Perhaps you have never heard
say of him? No matter, till a few days past he was only a name to me.
I remember that when I was a young man in Paris, I read a praise of
him in some journal; but in those days I was kneeling at other altars,
I was scrubbing other doorsteps.... So has it been ever since; always
a false god, always the wrong doorstep. I am sick of the smell of the
incense I have swung to this and that false god--Zola, Yeats, _et tous
ces autres_. I am angry to have got housemaid's knee, because I got
it on doorsteps that led to nowhere. There is but one doorstep worth
scrubbing. The doorstep of Charles Dickens....

Did he write many books? I know not, it does not greatly matter, he
wrote the "Pickwick Papers"; that suffices. I have read as yet but
one chapter, describing a Christmas party in a country house. Strange
that anyone should have essayed to write about anything but that!
Christmas--I see it now--is the only moment in which men and women are
really alive, are really worth writing about. At other seasons they
do not exist for the purpose of art. I spit on all seasons except
Christmas.... Is he not in all fiction the greatest figure, this Mr.
Wardell, this old "squire" rosy-cheeked, who entertains this Christmas
party at his house? He is more truthful, he is more significant, than
any figure in Balzac. He is better than all Balzac's figures rolled
into one.... I used to kneel on that doorstep. Balzac wrote many
books. But now it behoves me to ask myself wh