I remember at any rate feeling myself all in possession of little Hyacinth’s consistency, as I have called it, down at Dover during certain weeks that were none too remotely precedent to the autumn of 1885 and the appearance, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ again, of the first chapters of the story. There were certain sunny, breezy, balconied rooms at the quieter end of the Esplanade of that cheerful castle-crested little town—now infinitely perturbed by gigantic “harbour works,” but then only faded and over-soldiered and all pleasantly and humbly submissive to the law that snubs in due course the presumption of flourishing resorts—to which I had already more than once had recourse in hours of quickened industry and which, though much else has been swept away, still archaically exist. To have lately noted this again from the old benched and asphalted walk by the sea, the twinkling Channel beyond which on occasion the opposite coast of France used to gleam as an incident of the charming tendency of the whole prospect (immediate picture and fond design alike) amusingly to _shine_, was somehow to taste afresh, and with a certain surprise, the odd quality of that original confidence that the parts of my plan _would_ somehow hang together. I may wonder at my confidence now—given the extreme, the very particular truth and “authority” required at so many points; but to wonder is to live back gratefully into the finer reasons of things, with all the detail of harsh application and friction (that there must have been) quite happily blurred and dim. The finest of reasons—I mean for the sublime confidence I speak of—was that I felt in full _personal_ possession of my matter; this really seemed the fruit of direct experience. My scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities. To have adopted the scheme was to have had to meet the question of one’s “notes,” over the whole ground, the question of what, in such directions, one had “gone into” and how far one had gone; and to have answered that question—to one’s own satisfaction at least—was truly to see one’s way.