that he is excited and amused and exhilarated by the presence of these latter, by the freedom with which he lives and enjoys and sees and knows: the exhilaration proceeding during the "at first" time, as I put it, by the sense, the fairly intoxicating and spell-casting consciousness of how the inordinate business is going. His sense of success, which there is just enough of his critical margin or edge to appreciate, to estimate, and thus relate to his former consciousness and his whole starting-point, this _creates_ for him a part of the success, the success with the others, by the very spirit and glamour (to them) that it gives him and that keeps up till the change I visualise, the inevitable difference, to phrase it roughly, begins--begins by something that _happens_, something that springs out of the very situation itself for portent, for determination, and which I must work out, or work into, exactly the right dramatic identity for. This I guarantee; but meanwhile I am ahead of my argument, and must hark back for a few minutes to what I left standing and waiting above--that "this" which I was there about to follow up. At once, withal, I see it in images, which I must put as they come, and which make for me thus, don't I seem to feel? one of the first, if not _the_ very first passages of my action. An action, an action, an action must it thus insuperably be--as it has moreover so well started with being--from the first pulse to the last. Ralph, taking leave of the Ambassador, the depositary of his extraordinary truth and the (as he hopes) secured connection with the world he cuts himself loose from, dropping as from a balloon thousands of feet up in the air, and not really knowing what smash or what magically _soft_ concussion awaits him--Ralph, I say, in entering the house then walks at a step straight into 1820 and, closing the door behind him, shuts out everything to which he has hitherto belonged. He is from that minute, to his own eyes and all his own faculties, the young man in the portrait, the young man we have seen advance to him that night of his vigil in the drawing-room. This bridge or effective transition from the visit at the Embassy to the central drama is thus _found_ and is as good as another for my purpose--swift and straight and simple and direct; as I have on a foregoing page, however, sufficiently stated. Well then, I want to make it, _within_, his arrival, practically, from America to the London family: as to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?--to the fact of which an awkwardness and a difficulty would, I seem to make out, or _do_, rather, immediately attach. No, no--no latch-key--but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker; having effected which he stands there a moment, I think, his head very triumphantly high and confident, looking from the steps down at the Ambassador on the