name so few cases, to the disaffected guardian of an overgrown legend in _The Birthplace_, to the luckless fine artist of _The Next Time_, trying to despoil himself, for a “hit” and bread and butter, of his fatal fineness, to blunt the tips of his intellectual fingers, and to the hapless butler Brooksmith, ruined by good talk, disqualified for common domestic service by the beautiful growth of his habit of quiet attention, his faculty of appreciation. But though this demonstration of a rooted vice—since a vice it would appear mainly accounted—might yield amusement, the examples referred to must await their turn. I had had for a long time well before me, at any rate, my small obscure but ardent observer of the “London world,” saw him roam and wonder and yearn, saw all the unanswered questions and baffled passions that might ferment in him—once he should be made both sufficiently thoughtful and sufficiently “disinherited”; but this image, however interesting, was of course not by itself a progression, an action, didn’t by itself make a drama. I got my action, however—failing which one has nothing—under the prompt sense that the state of feeling I was concerned with might develop and beget another state, might return at a given moment, and with the greatest vivacity, on itself. To see this was really to feel one’s subject swim into one’s ken, especially after a certain other ingenious connexion had been made for it. I find myself again recalling, and with the possible “fun” of it reviving too, how I recognised, as revealed and prescribed, the particular complexion, profession and other conditions of my little presumptuous adventurer, with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity, his small cluster of “dingy” London associations and the swelling spirit in him which was to be the field of his strange experience. Accessible through his imagination, as I have hinted, to a thousand provocations and intimations, he would become most acquainted with destiny in the form of a lively inward revolution. His being jealous of all the ease of life of which he tastes so little, and, bitten, under this exasperation, with an aggressive, vindictive, destructive social faith, his turning to “treasons, stratagems and spoils” might be as vivid a picture as one chose, but would move to pity and terror only by the aid of some deeper complication, some imposed and formidable issue.