ple, but different and much more complex forces have ruled the
application of it; so much does the goodness of talk depend on what
there may be to talk about. There are more things in London, I think,
than anywhere in the world; hence the charm of the dramatic struggle
reflected in my book, the struggle somehow to fit propriety into
a smooth general case which is really all the while bristling and
crumbling into fierce particular ones. The circle surrounding Mrs.
Brookenham, in my pages, is of course nothing if not a particular,
even a "peculiar" one--and its rather vain effort (the vanity, the real
inexpertness, being precisely part of my tale) is toward the courage
of that condition. It has cropped up in a social order where individual
appreciations of propriety have not been formally allowed for, in spite
of their having very often quite rudely and violently and insolently,
rather of course than insidiously, flourished; so that as the matter
stands, rightly or wrongly, Nanda's retarded, but eventually none the
less real, incorporation means virtually Nanda's exposure. It means
this, that is, and many things beside--means them for Nanda herself and,
with a various intensity, for the other participants in the action;
but what it particularly means, surely, is the failure of successful
arrangement and the very moral, sharply pointed, of the fruits of
compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her to be in question
at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be
self-conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than
brave--the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing
meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself
feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign"
showing, for the painted picture of life. Beyond which let me add that
here immediately is a prime specimen of the way in which the obscurer,
the lurking relations of a motive apparently simple, always in wait for
their spring, may by seizing their chance for it send simplicity flying.
Poor Nanda's little case, and her mother's, and Mr. Longdon's and
Vanderbank's and Mitchy's, to say nothing of that of the others, has
only to catch a reflected light from over the Channel in order to double
at once its appeal to the imagination. (I am considering all these
matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that
faculty. With a relation NOT imaginative to his material the