in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them--of
which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d'architecture.
But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than
too much--when there's danger of its interfering with my measure
of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give--
having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one
must give all one can. As for the origin of one's wind-blown
germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where THEY come
from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn't
it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven,
that they are THERE at almost any turn of the road? They
accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among
them. They are the breath of life--by which I mean that life, in
its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner
prescribed and imposed--floated into our minds by the current of
life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic's quarrel, so
often, with one's subject, when he hasn't the wit to accept it.
Will he point out then which other it should properly have been?
--his office being, essentially to point out. Il en serait bien
embarrasse. Ah, when he points out what I've done or failed to do
with it, that's another matter: there he's on his ground. I give
him up my 'sarchitecture,'" my distinguished friend concluded,
"as much as he will."

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude
I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may
reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image
en disponibilite. It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to
have met for just that blest habit of one's own imagination, the
trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some