what an identity and what a connection reside in it. By what means, however, has he originally known it, learnt it, got into possession of it?--unless by one of the others' having stated it to him. I ask myself which then of the others--but only at once to recognise the matter as already determined for me by what I have threshed out. He gets the knowledge effectively and, as I call it, dramatically, to all intents and purposes scenically, by the fact that the little H.W. man, as I call him, betrays the wanted jealousy of him from the moment the elder girl breaks off from him. Up to that moment not, but after it, and on his turning to the younger, with whom the little H.W. man is, as I have shown, himself in love, _then_ entirely. This jealousy is practically what leads to his profession of the truth; so that there can be no question of his needing it from her--he so reads it in her manière d'être--up to the time of, and the great revolution constituted by, the scène à faire. What we get thus is her manière d'être for him, all sufficient, all infinitely touching, before that _scène_, and her condition and her action _after_ the same; which are two quite different things. _Then_, I mean in this latter case, her avowal, the only entire and direct one, is quite a different thing; out of which I have to pull, as I say, quite what I want. She has loved the man of 1820 _all in himself_--keep every shade of discrimination here flawlessly clear. She has loved him wholly without reward of course, and even under his more than indifference, his degree of contempt; entirely addressed as he was, and has been, to her elder sister. Yet I pull up too here, in the midst of my elation--though after a little I shall straighten everything out--to see that I introduce an element of confusion in trying to work the matter out as if anything can have _preceded_ Ralph's own, Ralph's "conscious" arrival. Awfully important, and not a little difficult, here, not to let any tangle or any embroilment lay its insidious trap. Doesn't Ralph know by his own experience, if he takes up the action from the moment, and the moment only, of "arriving", arriving for the first time, all that has happened for his predecessor and exactly what hasn't? There, however, I gasp with relief, is a question that would be embarrassing to me only if, on intenser reflection, I didn't see that I exactly haven't pretended that he doesn't _repeat_, repeat up to a certain point, the experience of the young man of the portrait? Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be scared, by a momentarily--confused appearance or assumption that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does; without which where is definitely that Past, that made and achieved, that once living and enacted Past which is the field of his business? He deflects in the midst of it, yes, by the