I see what then takes place between them as a virtual counterpart, in the way of his telling his story, to his scene with the Ambassador, the whole contents of Book III; only all in the note of his depression, his unspeakable homesickness for his own time and place--whereas the other whole passage had been in the note of his elation, eagerness and confidence. He makes, as I say, a clean breast to her--as he had made it under the then essential restriction to the Ambassador; with the immense difference, however, that whereas the effect in the latter case was to impress his then confidant with his being out of his mind, the present effect is, marvellously, prodigiously, to make our heroine believe in the truth of his extraordinary case, recognise how he puts it to her so because he is, because he has remained, exactly so sane, and that it is (prodigiously, marvellously as the force in her to do so may be on her part) to his sanity, exactly, to his convincing consistency, that she rallies. This rallying of hers is of course _the_ very point, for interest and beauty, for the climax of the romantic hocuspocus, of my sought total effect; the very flower, so to speak, of what I noted a little back as my scène à faire. As I have already said repeatedly enough, he tells her all, tells her all, all, all; which involves of course his telling her what he feels, has come to feel, in his being so "cut off", so now conclusively and hopelessly cut off, from the life, from the whole magnificent world from which he is truant, unless something, something _she_ perhaps can think of, may yet save him. His whole position becomes thus the plea to be saved, to be liberated--with his waiting on her devotion, her affection, her ingenuity, in a word her inspiration, somehow to let him off. All sorts of things to be done with this, in the beautiful and curious and interesting way, especially with the idea that she is sole among those of his actual life whom contact with him, the relation with him, doesn't now make "afraid". Of course this absence of fear on her part has to be based, has to have its own logic in order to have all its beauty; and when one asks oneself _why she_, why she only, thus extraordinarily, one seems both at once to be reduced for support, for illumination of it to the fact that she loves him, and that her affection can do it, and to the concomitant recognition that it will, that it _must_, serve. For it is what exactly and immediately supplies to the situation between them the idea of her being able to operate somehow or other by sacrifice, _her_ sacrifice, and of herself and her affection and her interest, somehow or other; so far as one doesn't make her interest, her interest in _how_ to do it, by its very intensity and, so to speak, curiosity, an inspiring motive. I must have had him put it to her straight, How, how, _how_ can you get me off, can you release me from this apprehension of having really lost all