a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an
immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign" showing, for
the painted picture of life. Beyond which let me add that here
immediately is a prime specimen of the way in which the obscurer, the
lurking relations of a motive apparently simple, always in wait for
their spring, may by seizing their chance for it send simplicity flying.
Poor Nanda's little case, and her mother's, and Mr. Longdon's and
Vanderbank's and Mitchy's, to say nothing of that of the others, has
only to catch a reflected light from over the Channel in order to double
at once its appeal to the imagination. (I am considering all these
matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that
faculty. With a relation NOT imaginative to his material the storyteller
has nothing whatever to do.)

It exactly happened moreover that my own material here was to profit in
a particular way by that extension of view. My idea was to be treated
with light irony--it would be light and ironical or it would be nothing;
so that I asked myself, naturally, what might be the least solemn form
to give it, among recognised and familiar forms. The question thus at
once arose: What form so familiar, so recognised among alert readers, as
that in which the ingenious and inexhaustible, the charming philosophic
"Gyp" casts most of her social studies? Gyp had long struck me as
mistress, in her levity, of one of the happiest of forms--the only
objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary benightedness
on the part of the Anglo-Saxon reader. One had noted this reader as
perverse and inconsequent in respect to the absorption of "dialogue"
--observed the "public for fiction" consume it, in certain connexions, on
the scale and with the smack of lips that mark the consumption of bread-
and-jam by a children's school-feast, consume it even at the theatre, so
far as our theatre ever vouchsafes it, and yet as flagrantly reject it