itself. As I scan my list I encounter none the "history" of which
embodies a greater number of curious truths--or of truths at least by
which I find contemplation more enlivened. The thing done and dismissed
has ever, at the best, for the ambitious workman, a trick of looking
dead, if not buried, so that he almost throbs with ecstasy when, on an
anxious review, the flush of life reappears. It is verily on recognising
that flush on a whole side of "The Awkward Age" that I brand it all, but
ever so tenderly, as monstrous--which is but my way of noting the
QUANTITY of finish it stows away. Since I speak so undauntedly, when
need is, of the value of composition, I shall not beat about the bush to
claim for these pages the maximum of that advantage. If such a feat be
possible in this field as really taking a lesson from one's own
adventure I feel I have now not failed of it--to so much more
demonstration of my profit than I can hope to carry through do I find
myself urged. Thus it is that, still with a remnant of self-respect, or
at least of sanity, one may turn to complacency, one may linger with
pride. Let my pride provoke a frown till I justify it; which--though
with more matters to be noted here than I have room for I shall
accordingly proceed to do.

Yet I must first make a brave face, no doubt, and present in its native
humility my scant but quite ponderable germ. The seed sprouted in that
vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which calls itself,
for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of the minor
"social phenomena" with which, as fruit for the observer, that
mightiest of the trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no doubt, a
fine purple peach, but it might pass for a round ripe plum, the note one
had inevitably had to take of the difference made in certain friendly
houses and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded,
often delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront of some