employable to attest that she was. I had, no doubt, a
groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable
to track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case stands, the
general situation exhibited. They are there, for what they are worth,
and as numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to
how and whence they came.

I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them--of
Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and
his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood and
Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer's
history. I recognised them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces
of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my "plot." It was as if they had
simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in
response to my primary question: "Well, what will she DO?" Their answer
seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me; on which,
with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as
they could, I trusted them. They were like the group of attendants and
entertainers who come down by train when people in the country give a
party; they represented the contract for carrying the party on. That was
an excellent relation with them--a possible one even with so broken a
reed (from her slightness of cohesion) as Henrietta Stackpole. It is a
familiar truth to the novelist, at the strenuous hour, that, as certain
elements in any work are of the essence, so others are only of the
form; that as this or that character, this or that disposition of the
material, belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that
other belongs to it but indirectly--belongs intimately to the treatment.
This is a truth, however, of which he rarely gets the benefit--since it
could be assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception,
criticism which is too little of this world. He must not think of
benefits, moreover, I freely recognise, for that way dishonour lies:
he has, that is, but one to think of--the benefit, whatever it may be,
involved in his having cast a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest,
forms of attention. This is all he is entitled to; he is entitled to
nothing, he is bound to admit, that can come to him, from the reader, as
a result on the latter's part of any act of reflexion or discrimination.
He may ENJOY this finer tribute--that is another a