These sentences might well be taken as de Maupassant's inspiration. De Maupassant, a man of powerful mind, with Flaubert's example before him, makes each of his tales a rounded unity, and a thing outside himself, and yet a thing that no one else could have written. He shunned fine subjects. His stories are like sections of life prepared for examination, and in looking at them we are flattered into thinking that we have clearer eyes than usual. He chooses some quite ordinary incident, and by working up selected details of it, turns it into a story as exciting to the curiosity as a detective puzzle. He allows no abstract feminine-phrased discourses on the psychology of his characters: he does not take advantage of their confessions. Their psychology is manifested in things said and in things done. The works, as in life, are hidden in the fourth dimension, where we cannot see them. _La Rendezvous_, a tiny story of seven pages, will illustrate his methods. The chosen incident is that of a woman going to see her lover, meeting some one else on the way, and going off with him instead. That is all. Let us see how de Maupassant works it out. Here is his first paragraph: 'Her hat on her head, her cloak on her back, a black veil across her face, another in her pocket, which she would put on over the first as soon as she was in the guilty cab, she was tapping the point of her boot with the end of her umbrella, and stayed sitting in her room, unable to make up her mind to go out to keep the appointment.' The whole of her indecision is expressed before it is explained. Then there is a paragraph that lets us know that she had been keeping the appointment regularly for two years, and we sympathise with her a little. A description of her room follows, made by mention of a clock ticking the seconds, a half-read book on a rosewood desk, and a perfume. The clock strikes and she goes out, lying to the servant. We watch her, loitering on the way, telling herself that the Vicomte awaiting her would be opening the window, listening at the door, sitting down, getting up, and, since she had forbidden him to smoke on the days of her visits, throwing desperate glances at the cigarette-box. De Maupassant's characters think in pictures of physical action. People do so in real life.