at which he recalls ruefully that the great merit of such and such a
small case, the merit for his particular advised use, had been precisely
in the smallness.

I may say at once that this had seemed to me, under the first flush of
recognition, the good mark for the pretty notion of the "free circle"
put about by having, of a sudden, an ingenuous mind and a pair of limpid
searching eyes to count with. Half the attraction was in the current
actuality of the thing: repeatedly, right and left, as I have said, one
had seen such a drama constituted, and always to the effect of proposing
to the interested view one of those questions that are of the essence of
drama: what will happen, who suffer, who not suffer, what turn be
determined, what crisis created, what issue found? There had of course
to be, as a basis, the free circle, but this was material of that
admirable order with which the good London never leaves its true lover
and believer long unprovided. One could count them on one's fingers (an
abundant allowance), the liberal firesides beyond the wide glow of
which, in a comparative dimness, female adolescence hovered and waited.
The wide glow was bright, was favourable to "real" talk, to play of
mind, to an explicit interest in life, a due demonstration of the
interest by persons I qualified to feel it: all of which meant
frankness and ease, the perfection, almost, as it were, of
intercourse, and a tone as far as possible removed from that of the
nursery and the schoolroom--as far as possible removed even, no doubt,
in its appealing "modernity," from that of supposedly privileged scenes
of conversation twenty years ago. The charm was, with a hundred other
things, in the freedom--the freedom menaced by the inevitable irruption
of the ingenuous mind; whereby, if the freedom should be sacrificed,
what would truly BECOME of the charm? The charm might be figured as dear
to members of the circle consciously contributing to it, but it was none