She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a moment and reflect to understand. Take any person whom you know particularly well--do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him; if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you may; and yet you think you know _him_ rather well! The truth is, you know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall. You’ve never done that--why should you? But you must do just that if you are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case, for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait. Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice” of feminine perception, a quality which makes _Pride and Prejudice_ immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled, constitute a merciless betrayal--the betrayal is merciless whether it is favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme, but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too readily as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors.