The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, and you, together with the great majority of British readers, insist upon having a happy ending, or, if not a happy ending, at least some sort of an ending. This is a desire, like the desire for gin-and-water or any other comforting stimulant, against which I have nothing to say. You go to books to be taken out of yourself, I to be shown where I stand. For me, as for you, a book must have a beginning and an end. But whereas for you the end is something arbitrarily final, such as the ring of wedding-bells, a funeral service, or the taking of a public-house, for me--since to me a novel is the history of an “affair”--finality is only found at what seems to me to be the end of that “affair.” There is in life nothing final. So that even “affairs” never really have an end as far as the lives of the actors are concerned. Thus, although Dudley Leicester was, as I have tried to indicate, cured almost immediately by the methods of Katya Lascarides, it would be absurd to imagine that the effects of his short breakdown would not influence the whole of his after-life. These effects may have been to make him more conscientious, more tender, more dogged, less self-centred; may have been to accentuate him in a great number of directions. For no force is ever lost, and the ripple raised by a stone, striking upon the bank of a pool, goes on communicating its force for ever and ever throughout space and throughout eternity. But for our vision its particular “affair” ends when, striking the bank, it disappears. So for me the “affair” of Dudley Leicester’s madness ended at the moment when Katya Lascarides laid her hands upon his temple. In the next moment he would be sane, the ripple of madness would have disappeared from the pond of his life. To have gone on farther would have been, not to have ended this book, but to have begun another, which--the fates being good--I hope to write. I shall profit, without doubt, by your companionship, instruction, and great experience. You have called me again and again an Impressionist, and this I have been called so often that I suppose it must be the fact. Not that I know what an Impressionist is. Personally, I use as few words as I may to get any given effect, to render any given conversation. You, I presume, do the same. You don’t, I mean, purposely put in more words than you need--more words, that is to say, than seem to you to satisfy your desire for expression. You would probably render a conversation thus: “Extending her hand, which was enveloped in creamy tulle, Mrs. Sincue exclaimed, ‘Have another cup of tea, dear?’ ‘Thanks--two lumps,’ her visitor rejoined. ‘So I hear Colonel Hapgood has eloped with his wife’s French maid!’” I should probably set it down: