and concluding upon it--which is after all the only way we really know anything. I don't want to repeat what I have done at least a couple of times, I seem to remember, and notably in The Liar--the "discovery", or the tell-tale representation of an element in the sitter written clear by the artist's projection of it on canvas. At the same time I am not afraid; I see its office well enough and needn't trouble if once the idea appeals, as I think it really does. In this case it's worked in early; the notion of my young man having his portrait as a matter of course done in London coming in with perfect naturalness. He has it done for his prospective bride; she takes an interest in it of the very greatest at first; and it is the little H.W. man who recommends, who selects, the artist. I see all sorts of curious things in this--it perfectly bristles with them, and with one's chance, above all, of making the personage in question (and I do want another figure, to people the canvas a little more) a real vision to Ralph, a character of the time, intensely typical for Ralph; through whose sense of all which, however, I tread the delicate ground of imputations to him, of perceptions, discriminations, estimates more or less at variance with his 1820 identity. That delicate ground, I have only to remind myself, is absolutely the very most attaching ground of my process; solvitur ambulando--I have only to find myself in close quarters with it to get from it force and felicity. I present then the painter-man, I make him, do him, see him and use him; use him to very good purpose. Don't I kind of see Ralph's suspicion of being suspected come to a head in the sight of something produced on the little H.W. man's part, on his nerves and in his fancy, in fine, through an active correspondence with the malaise the artist has caused in him through divinably feeling it himself? The foregoing difficult to state, but one is quite possessed of it; there's a great lot in it--only too much, alas, given my faculty for amplifying and going far. However, a rigorous tight hand on the excess of that is my very law of life here. I do feel how an effective further twist or two hangs about the question of the portrait. We get it surely as painted full face on--with the rendered face, in other words, that is turned away from Ralph's 1910 vision of him on that night in the house. Yes, he sits for it in 1820; he sees it grow, he sees and feels what grows out of it--I really don't see why the fact of it, the high conceit of it, mayn't do for me a good deal of my work. It plays a part in the situation--though I must square the difficulty of the artist "feeling about his sitter" as he more and more does and yet being able to keep his method and process, his application of his ability, well in hand, in order to put the thing through. It's a fine thing, a very fine one--I need it as that; for the finer it is the more it plays its part in the