give it, so far as the raising on it of a superstructure goes,
with the maximum of ease. Well, I recall perfectly how little, in
my now quite established connexion, the maximum of ease appealed
to me, and how I seemed to get rid of it by an honest
transposition of the weights in the two scales. "Place the
centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness," I
said to myself, "and you get as interesting and as beautiful a
difficulty as you could wish. Stick to THAT--for the centre;
put the heaviest weight into THAT scale, which will be so largely
the scale of her relation to herself. Make her only interested
enough, at the same time, in the things that are not herself, and
this relation needn't fear to be too limited. Place meanwhile in
the other scale the lighter weight (which is usually the one that
tips the balance of interest): press least hard, in short, on
the consciousness of your heroine's satellites, especially the
male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater one.
See, at all events, what can be done in this way. What better
field could there be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers,
inextinguishable, as a charming creature, and the job will be to
translate her into the highest terms of that formula, and as
nearly as possible moreover into ALL of them. To depend upon her
and her little concerns wholly to see you through will
necessitate, remember, your really 'doing' her."

So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical
rigour, I now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence
for erecting on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and
proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it and that was thus
to form, constructionally speaking, a literary monument. Such is
the aspect that to-day "The Portrait" wears for me: a structure