vero ma ben trovato_" should be your motto; and if you refuse to kill
your heroine on the Saturday night because, forsooth, she really did,
despite all dramatic propriety, survive till Monday morning--why, please
yourself; but do not bring your inanities to me!

I have now to reconcile this profession of faith with the incongruous fact
that the following story is a true one. True it is, in whole and in part;
furthermore, the events took place in the present century, and within a
hundred miles of London. But let me observe, in the first place, that,
although a true tale, it is nevertheless strange and interesting to an
unusual degree; and, secondly, that this interest and strangeness mainly
depend, not upon the succession of incidents, but upon the subjective
condition--character it cannot be termed--of Archibald Malmaison himself.
This being the case, it follows that the greater part of the objections
above insisted upon fall to the ground. What goes on inside a man must
needs be accepted as it is revealed to us: to invent psychological
attributes does not lie within the province of a romancer. His skill and
power are confined to so selecting and arranging the incidents as to
provide his psychological data with the freest possible development. In
the present case I might easily have devised a stage and a series of
events for Malmaison, which would have brought his mysterious affection
into somewhat more prominent and picturesque relief. But that affection is
itself so absorbing a problem, that the fashion of its statement becomes
of comparatively small import; and I may add that the setting furnished by
nature happens on this occasion to answer all practical purposes tolerably
well. Moreover, I am not altogether a free agent in the matter. The friend
by whose permission I tell the tale is of opinion that no liberties ought
to be taken with its form, any more than with what he is pleased to call
its "physiological characteristics." The main significance of the
narrative being, according to him, of a scientific or pathological kind,