take them--they form as good an illustration as I can recall of the
manner in which, for the good of his soul doubtless, fate sometimes
deals with a man's avidity. These incidents certainly had larger
bearings than the comparatively meagre consequence we are here
concerned with--though I feel that consequence also a thing to
speak of with some respect. It's mainly in such a light, I
confess, at any rate, that the ugly fruit of my exile is at this
hour present to me. Even at first indeed the spirit in which my
avidity, as I have called it, made me regard that term owed no
element of ease to the fact that before coming back from Rapallo
George Corvick addressed me in a way I objected to. His letter had
none of the sedative action I must to-day profess myself sure he
had wished to give it, and the march of occurrences was not so
ordered as to make up for what it lacked. He had begun on the
spot, for one of the quarterlies, a great last word on Vereker's
writings, and this exhaustive study, the only one that would have
counted, have existed, was to turn on the new light, to utter--oh,
so quietly!--the unimagined truth. It was in other words to trace
the figure in the carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it
in every tint. The result, according to my friend, would be the
greatest literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me
was just to be so good as not to trouble him with questions till he
should hang up his masterpiece before me. He did me the honour to
declare that, putting aside the great sitter himself, all aloft in
his indifference, I was individually the connoisseur he was most
working for. I was therefore to be a good boy and not try to peep
under the curtain before the show was ready: I should enjoy it all
the more if I sat very still.

I did my best to sit very still, but I couldn't help giving a jump