To avoid conventional chapter transitions, to write swiftly with weight, emotion, also succinctly; to cram every inch of space with ideas as well as action--the fiction of the future--all this I fear is not in abundance. Henry James is the man who may solve the difficulty. Flaubert swore that the characters should reveal themselves by their acts, and loathed long-winded analyses, though he abused his powers of description. It is his narrative that is the pride and despair of his successors. Henry James says character is plot, but plot is not character. That's my notion. And Cardinal Newman was also correct when he gently insinuated that no one could make psychology easy reading. He didn't live long enough to read William James. Lord, Lord! And we go afield to burn incense under foreign nostrils and here we can boast of two such brothers of genius as William and Henry James. Magnificent genius. But to bed. I'm afraid I'm a confused thinker. I wonder what Easter--no I mean Mona--is doing now? Encore la femme! He fell asleep and dreamed of a strange blonde creature, all fun and fire and flame. XII Ulick was shown into a room filled with carbon photographs by a coloured butler in sober livery. It was an ante-chamber on the first floor of a large, old-fashioned house on a side-street off the Avenue somewhere in the thirties; he forgot just where. When he entered the atelier, huge in size, he was greeted by a half dozen men he knew; some he had chummed with in Paris; one, Robbie Sanderson--the Bullrush, he was nicknamed--had been an intimate of Oswald Invern's. He, too, was a painter. The host, Ned Haldane, called the Zephyr, because he was so fat and light on his feet, welcomed the newcomer, as did big Stanley the sculptor and popular man-around-town. It was a group congenial to Ulick. All were graduated from the Parisian art treadmill; men who took a liberal view of life, men without puritan morals and with charming manners.