hand the part of the business
that can least be likened to the chase with horn and hound. It's all a
sedentary part--involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit
the highest salary paid to a chief accountant. Not, however, that the
chief accountant hasn't HIS gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at
least the equilibrium of the artist's state dwells less, surely, in the
further delightful complications he can smuggle in than in those he
succeeds in keeping out. He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a
crop; wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he
must keep his head at any price. In consequence of all which, for the
interest of the matter, I might seem here to have my choice of
narrating my "hunt" for Lambert Strether, of describing the capture of
the shadow projected by my friend's anecdote, or of reporting on the
occurrences subsequent to that triumph. But I had probably best
attempt a little to glance in each direction; since it comes to me
again and again, over this licentious record, that one's bag of
adventures, conceived or conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the
mere telling of one's story. It depends so on what one means by that
equivocal quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks
to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself. I
blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist, and
the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as really the
more objective of the two.

The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour
there, amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have been
then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically and, as the
artless craft of comedy has it, "led up" to; the probable course to
such a goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would have in
short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from and why has he
come, what is he doing (as we Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in our
foredoomed clutch of exotic aids to expression) in that galere? To
answer these questions plausibly, to answer them as under
cross-examination in the witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in
other words satisfactorily to account for Strether and for his
"peculiar tone," was to possess myself of the entire fabric. At the
same time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a certain principle
of probability: he wouldn't have indulged in his peculiar tone without