ways, fifty excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the
novel, as largely practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the
loose end. The play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically
right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface,
and as grave a dishonour, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on
the right side of a tapestry. We are shut up wholly to cross-relations,
relations all within the action itself; no part of which is related
to anything but some other part--save of course by the relation of the
total to life. And, after invoking the protection of Gyp, I saw the
point of my game all in the problem of keeping these conditioned
relations crystalline at the same time that I should, in emulation of
life, consent to their being numerous and fine and characteristic of
the London world (as the London world was in this quarter and that to be
deciphered). All of which was to make in the event for complications.

I see now of course how far, with my complications, I got away from Gyp;
but I see to-day so much else too that this particular deflexion from
simplicity makes scarce a figure among the others after having once
served its purpose, I mean, of lighting my original imitative innocence.
For I recognise in especial, with a waking vibration of that interest
in which, as I say, the plan of the book is embalmed for me, that
my subject was probably condemned in advance to appreciable, or more
exactly perhaps to almost preposterously appreciative, over-treatment.
It places itself for me thus in a group of small productions exhibiting
this perversity, representations of conceived cases in which my process
has been to pump the case gaspingly dry, dry not only of superfluous
moisture, but absolutely (for I have encountered the charge) of
breathable air. I may note, in fine, that coming back to the pages
before us with a strong impression of their recording, to my shame,
that disaster, even to the extent of its disqualifying them for decent
reappearance, I have found the adventure taking, to my relief,
quite another turn, and have lost myself in the wonder of what
"over-treatment" may, in the detail of its desperate ingenuity, consist
of. The revived interest I speak of has been therefore that of following
critically, from page to page, even as the red Indian tracks in the
forest the pale-face, the footsteps of the systematic loyalty I was able
to achieve. The amusement of this c