women have
exercised over some of the strongest and most virile of men. Fenwick
indeed possesses the painter's susceptibility to beauty. Beauty comes
to him and beguiles him, but it is a beauty akin to that of Michel
Angelo's 'Muse and dominant Lady, spirit-wed'--which yet, for all its
purity, is not, as Fenwick's case shows, without its tragic effects in
the world.

On looking through my notes, I find that this was not my first idea.
The distracting intervening woman was to have been of a commoner type,
intellectual indeed rather than sensuous, but yet of the predatory
type and class, which delights in the capture of man. When I began to
write the first scene in which Eugenie was to appear, she was still
nebulous and uncertain. Then she did appear--suddenly!--as though the
mists parted. It was not the woman I had been expecting and preparing
for. But I saw her quite distinctly; she imposed herself; and
thenceforward I had nothing to do but to draw her.

The drawing of Eugenie made perhaps my chief pleasure in the story,
combined with that of the two landscapes--the two sharply contrasted
landscapes--Westmoreland and Versailles, which form its main
background. I find in a note-book that it was begun 'early in May,
1905, at Robin Ghyll. Finished (at Stocks) on Tuesday night or rather
Wednesday morning, 1 A.M., Dec. 6, 1905. Deo Gratias!' And an earlier
note, written in Westmoreland itself, records some of the impressions
amid which the first chapters were written. I give it just as I find
it:

'The exquisiteness of the spring. The strong-limbed sycamores with
their broad expanding leaves. The leaping streams, and the small
waterfalls, white and foaming--the cherry blossom, the white
farms, the dark yews which are the northern cypresses--and the tall
upstanding firs and hollies, vigorously black against the delicate
bareness of the fells, like some passionate self-assertive life....

'The "old" statesman B----. His talk of the gentle democratic poet
who used to live in the cottage before us. "He wad never taeak wi the
betther class o' foak--but he'd coom mony a time, an hae a crack wi my
missus an me."

'The swearing ploughman that I watched this morning--driving his
plough through old pastures and swearing at the horse--"Dang ye!
Darned old hoss! Pull up, will ye--_pull_ up, dang ye!"

'Elterwater, and the soft grouping of the hills. The blue lake, the
woods in tints of pale green and pinkish brown, nestling into