pable of it, and on the fact that
its loyal entertainer, cultivating fondly its possible relations and
extensions, the bright efflorescence latent in it, but having to take
other things in their order too, is terribly at the mercy of his mind.
That organ has only to exhale, in its degree, a fostering tropic air in
order to produce complications almost beyond reckoning. The trap laid
for his superficial convenience resides in the fact that, though the
relations of a human figure or a social occurrence are what make such
objects interesting, they also make them, to the same tune, difficult to
isolate, to surround with the sharp black line, to frame in the square,
the circle, the charming oval, that helps any arrangement of objects
to become a picture. The storyteller has but to have been condemned by
nature to a liberally amused and beguiled, a richly sophisticated, view
of relations and a fine inquisitive speculative sense for them, to find
himself at moments flounder in a deep warm jungle. These are the moments
at which he recalls ruefully that the great merit of such and such a
small case, the merit for his particular advised use, had been precisely
in the smallness.

I may say at once that this had seemed to me, under the first flush of
recognition, the good mark for the pretty notion of the "free circle"
put about by having, of a sudden, an ingenuous mind and a pair of limpid
searching eyes to count with. Half the attraction was in the current
actuality of the thing: repeatedly, right and left, as I have said, one
had seen such a drama constituted, and always to the effect of proposing
to the interested view one of those questions that are of the essence
of drama: what will happen, who suffer, who not suffer, what turn be
determined, what crisis created, what issue found? There had of course
to be, as a basis, the free circle, but this was material of that
admirable order with which the good London never leaves its true lover
and believer long unprovided. One could count them on one's fingers
(an abundant allowance), the liberal firesides beyond the wide glow of
which, in a comparative dimness, female adolescence hovered and waited.
The wide glow was bright, was favourable to "real" talk, to play of
mind, to an explicit interest in life, a due demonstration of the
interest by persons I qualified to feel it: all of which meant frankness
and ease, the perfection, almost, as it were, of intercourse, and a
tone as far as