conclusions which the psychologist finds himself unwillingly compelled to draw. And not in them only, but throughout his other writings also, we can trace the spirit-workings of the man to whom life in its entirety, no less than certain sorrowful phases of it is "a cruel enigma." JULIAN CRAY. DEDICATION. TO Mr. HENRY JAMES. Allow me, my dear Henry James, to place your name on the first page of this book in memory of the time at which I was beginning to write it, and which was also the time when we became acquainted. In our conversations in England last summer, protracted sometimes at one of the tables in the hospitable Athenæum Club, sometimes beneath the shade of the trees in some vast park, sometimes on the Dover esplanade while it echoed to the tumult of the waves, we often discussed the art of novel-writing, an art which is the most modern of all because it is the most flexible, and the most capable of adaptation to the varied requirements of every temperament. We were agreed that the laws imposed upon novelists by the various æsthetics resolve themselves ultimately into this: to give a personal impression of life. Will you find this impression in "A Cruel Enigma"? I trust so, that this work may be truly worthy of being offered to one whose rare and subtle talent, intelligent sympathy, and noble character, I have been able to appreciate as reader, fellow-worker, and friend. P.B. _Paris, 9th February_, 1885. CONTENTS CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII A CRUEL ENIGMA. CHAPTER I All men accustomed to feel through their imaginations are well acquainted with that unique description of melancholy which is inflicted by too complete a likeness between a mother and her daughter, when the mother is fifty years old and the daughter twenty-five, and the one happens thus to exhibit the looked-for spectre of the old age of the other. How fruitful in bitterness for a lover is such a vision of the inevitable withering reserved for the beauty that he loves! To the eye of a disinterested observer such likenesses abound in singularly suggestive reflections. Rarely, indeed, does the analogy between the features of the two faces extend to identity, and still more rarely are the expressions completely alike. There has usually been a sort of onward march in the common temperament from one generation to the next. The predominant quality in the physiognomy has become more predominant still--a visible symbol of a development of character produced by heredity. Already too refined, the face has become still more so; sensual, it has been materialised; wilful, it has grown hard and dry.