"Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the facts. Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is--1813 brandy, in considerable quantities bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire House. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge Mr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we shall not put things coarsely, and for a long time you will be by no means clear what the 'spirit' is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away, trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying--if one must put the thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention--to sell the stuff.... "Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand, rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr. Blandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his brandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a delicacy, with a dignity.... "He consults friends--impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends. "There are misunderstandings. One old and trusted intimate concludes rather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a poem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that he wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research Society.... All this," said Boon, "remains, perhaps indefinitely, to be worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has found for him--one never gets nearer to it than the 'real right people.' The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend of gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify, to estimate quantities. Ultimately he will--shall we say it?--make an offer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last approaches the hoard.... "You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable suggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by circumlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its realization, that--the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least helpless--in the inner cellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without opulence, hangs--_diminuendo morendo_--in the air...." CHAPTER THE FIFTH Of the Assembling and Opening of the World Conference on the Mind of the Race § 1