of Becky's
brilliance; but the significant look that the actual facts might have
worn and must have betrayed, the look that by this time Thackeray has
so fully instructed his reader to catch--this is not disclosed after
all. There is still nothing here but Thackeray's amusing,
irrepressible conversation _about_ the scene; he cannot make up his
mind to clear a space before it and give the situation the free field
it cries out for. And if it is asked what kind of clarity I mean, I
need only recall another page, close by, which shows it perfectly.
Becky had made an earlier appearance at Gaunt House; she had dined
there, near the beginning of her social career, and had found herself
in a difficulty; there came a moment when she had to face the frigid
hostility of the noble ladies of the party, alone with them in the
drawing-room, and her assurance failed. In the little scene that
ensues the charming veil of Thackeray's talk is suddenly raised; there
is Becky seated at the piano, Lady Steyne listening in a dream of old
memories, the other women chattering at a distance, when the jarring
doors are thrown open and the men return. It is all over in half a
page, but in that glimpse the story is lifted forward dramatically;
ocular proof, as it were, is added to Thackeray's account of Becky's
doubtful and delicate position. As a matter of curiosity I mention the
one moment in the later episode, the evening of those strangely
ineffective charades at Gaunt House, which appears to me to open the
same kind of rift in the haze; it is a single glimpse of Steyne,
applauding Becky's triumph. He is immediately there, an actor in the
show, alive and expressive, but he is alone; none of the others so
emerges, even Becky is only a luminous spot in the dimness. As for the
relation of the three, Steyne, Becky, and her husband, which is on the
point of becoming so important, there is nothing to be seen of it.

Right and left in the novels of Thackeray one may gather instances of
the same kind--the piercing and momentary shaft of direct vision, the
big scene approached and then refused. It is easy to find another in
Vanity Fair. Who but Thackeray could have borne to use the famous
matter of the Waterloo ball, a wonderful gift for a novelist to find
in his path, only to waste it, to dissipate its effect, to get no real
contribution from it after all? In the queer, haphazard, polyglot
interlude that precedes it Thackeray is, of course, entirely at