natural; and then as his father's return still failed my having
the inspiration that at once terminated the strain of the scene and yet
prolonged the sublime connection. Mightn't _I_ then hurry off for Mr.
Paget?--on whom, as fast as a cab could carry me, I would wait with the
request that he would come at the first possible moment to the rescue.
Mrs. Lewes's and our stricken companion's instant appreciation of this
offer lent me wings on which I again feel myself borne very much as if
suddenly acting as a messenger of the gods--surely I had never come so
near to performing in that character. I shook off my fellow visitor for
swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it
even in the dull four-wheeler of other days which, on getting out of the
house, I recognised as the only object animating, at a distance, the
long blank Sunday vista beside the walled-out Regent's Park. I crawled
to Hanover Square--or was it Cavendish? I let the question stand--and,
after learning at the great man's door that though he was not at home he
was soon expected back and would receive my message without delay,
cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my
vibration.

It was doubtless even excessive in proportion to its cause--yet in what
else but that consisted the force and the use of vibrations? It was by
their excess that one knew them for such, as one for that matter only
knew things in general worth knowing. I didn't know what I had expected
as an effect of our offered homage, but I had somehow not, at the best,
expected a relation--and now a relation had been dramatically
determined. It would exist for me if I should never again in all the
world ask a feather's weight of it; for myself, that is, it would simply
never be able not somehow to act. Its virtue was not in truth at all
flagrantly to be put to the proof--any opportunity for that underwent at
the best a considerable lapse; but why wasn't it intensely acting, none
the less, during the time when, before being in London again for any
length of stay, I found it intimately concerned in my perusal of
Middlemarch, so soon then to appear, and even in that of Deronda, its
intervention on behalf of which defied any chill of time? And to these
references I can but subjoin that they obviously most illustrate the
operation of a sense for drama. The process of appropriation of the two
fictions was experience, in great intensity, and roundabout the fie