.

He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the things
that solve his difficulties. And what tiny little animals he sometimes
manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances of
inspiration! Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his hero
with:--

As to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a
bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?... No,
no--no latch-key--but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big
brass knocker.

As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is to
betray the "abnormalism" of his hero to the 1820 world in which he
moves, he cries to himself:--

Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the
story.

At another stage in the story, he comments:--

All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being
what I mean.

At yet another stage:--

I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation--though after a
little I shall straighten everything out.

He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the
1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in the
portrait, and confides to himself:--

Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let
myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an
assumption, that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my
wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does.

Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work expressed
more finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his hero
at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he
is under the observation of his _alter ego_, and is being vaguely
threatened. "There must," the author tells himself--

There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out--the
successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the
very points and under the very tops that I reserve for them. That's
it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the
perfection of the salience of each, and the trick is played.

"Trick," he says, but Henry James resorted little to tricks, in the
ordinary meaning of the word. He scorns the easy and the obvious, as in
preparing for the return of the young hero to the modern world--a
return made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice