vague slip of a daughter. For such mild revolutions as these not, to
one's imagination, to remain mild one had had, I dare say, to be
infinitely addicted to "noticing"; under the rule of that secret vice or
that unfair advantage, at any rate, the "sitting downstairs," from a
given date, of the merciless maiden previously perched aloft could
easily be felt as a crisis. This crisis, and the sense for it in those
whom it most concerns, has to confess itself courageously the prime
propulsive force of "The Awkward Age." Such a matter might well make a
scant show for a "thick book," and no thick book, but just a quite
charmingly thin one, was in fact originally dreamt of. For its proposed
scale the little idea seemed happy--happy, that is, above all in having
come very straight; but its proposed scale was the limit of a small
square canvas. One had been present again and again at the exhibition I
refer to--which is what I mean by the "coming straight" of this
particular London impression; yet one was (and through fallibilities
that after all had their sweetness, so that one would on the whole
rather have kept them than parted with them) still capable of so false a
measurement. When I think indeed of those of my many false measurements
that have resulted, after much anguish, in decent symmetries, I find the
whole case, I profess, a theme for the philosopher. The little ideas one
wouldn't have treated save for the design of keeping them small, the
developed situations that one would never with malice prepense have
undertaken, the long stories that had thoroughly meant to be short, the
short subjects that had underhandedly plotted to be long, the hypocrisy
of modest beginnings, the audacity of misplaced middles, the triumph of
intentions never entertained--with these patches, as I look about, I see
my experience paved: an experience to which nothing is wanting save, I
confess, some grasp of its final lesson.

This lesson would, if operative, surely provide some law for the