by
which I find contemplation more enlivened. The thing done and dismissed
has ever, at the best, for the ambitious workman, a trick of looking
dead, if not buried, so that he almost throbs with ecstasy when, on an
anxious review, the flush of life reappears. It is verily on recognising
that flush on a whole side of "The Awkward Age" that I brand it all,
but ever so tenderly, as monstrous--which is but my way of noting the
QUANTITY of finish it stows away. Since I speak so undauntedly, when
need is, of the value of composition, I shall not beat about the bush to
claim for these pages the maximum of that advantage. If such a feat
be possible in this field as really taking a lesson from one's
own adventure I feel I have now not failed of it--to so much more
demonstration of my profit than I can hope to carry through do I find
myself urged. Thus it is that, still with a remnant of self-respect,
or at least of sanity, one may turn to complacency, one may linger with
pride. Let my pride provoke a frown till I justify it; which--though
with more matters to be noted here than I have room for I shall
accordingly proceed to do.

Yet I must first make a brave face, no doubt, and present in its native
humility my scant but quite ponderable germ. The seed sprouted in that
vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which calls itself,
for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of the minor
"social phenomena" with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest
of the trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no doubt, a fine
purple peach, but it might pass for a round ripe plum, the note one had
inevitably had to take of the difference made in certain friendly houses
and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded, often
delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront of some vague
slip of a daughter. For such mild revolutions as these not, to one's
imagination, to remain mild one had had, I dare say, to be infinitely
addicted to "noticing"; under the rule of that secret vice or that
unfair advantage, at any rate, the "sitting downstairs," from a given
date, of the merciless maiden previously perched aloft could easily be
felt as a crisis. This crisis, and the sense for it in those whom it
most concerns, has to confess itself courageously the prime propulsive
force of "The Awkward Age." Such a matter might well make a scant show
for a "thick book," and no thick book, but just a quite c