ld
was drawn the distinguishable ring of something that belonged equally to
this condition and that embraced and further vivified the imaged mass,
playing in upon it lights of surpassing fineness. So it was, at any
rate, that my "relation"--for I didn't go so far as to call it
"ours"--helped me to squeeze further values from the intrinsic substance
of the copious final productions I have named, a weight of variety,
dignity and beauty of which I have never allowed my measure to shrink.

Even this example of a rage for connections, I may also remark, doesn't
deter me from the mention here, somewhat out of its order of time, of
another of those in which my whole privilege of reference to Mrs. Lewes,
such as it remained, was to look to be preserved. I stretch over the
years a little to overtake it, and it calls up at once another person,
the ornament, or at least the diversion, of a society long since extinct
to me, but who, in common with every bearer of a name I yield to the
temptation of writing, insists on profiting promptly by the fact of
inscription--very much as if first tricking me into it and then proving
it upon me. The extinct societies that once were so sure of themselves,
how can they _not_ stir again if the right touch, that of a hand they
actually knew, however little they may have happened to heed it, reaches
tenderly back to them? The touch _is_ the retrieval, so far as it goes,
setting up as it does heaven knows what undefeated continuity. I must
have been present among the faithful at North Bank during a Sunday
afternoon or two of the winter of '77 and '78--I was to see the great
lady alone but on a single occasion before her death; but those
attestations are all but lost to me now in the livelier pitch of a
scene, as I can only call it, of which I feel myself again, all
amusedly, rather as sacrificed witness. I had driven over with Mrs.
Greville from Milford Cottage, in Surrey, to the villa George Eliot and
George Lewes had not long before built themselves, and which they much
inhabited, at Witley--this indeed, I well remember, in no great flush of
assurance that my own measure of our intended felicity would be quite
that of my buoyant hostess. But here exactly comes, with my memory of
Mrs. Greville, from which numberless by-memories dangle, the interesting
question that makes for my recall why things happened, under her
much-waved wing, not in any too coherent fashion--and this even though
it was never