Well, you take
me by the hand and lead me back and in, and still in, and make
things beautifully up to me--ALL my losses and misses and
exclusions and privation--and do it by having taken all the right
notes, apprehended all the right values and enjoyed all the right
reactions--meaning by the right ones, those that must have
ministered most to interest and emotion; those that I dimly made
you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop
window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say,
or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken
all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned
increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or
three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past);
but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed,
and the torch you play over them is often luridly illuminating. I
find my experience, therefore, the experience of simply reading
you (you having had all t'other) veritably romantic. But I want so
to go on that I deplore your apparent arrest--Saint Simon is in
forty volumes--why should Margot be put in one? Your own portrait
is an extraordinarily patient and detached and touch-upon-touch
thing; but the book itself really constitutes an image of you by
its strength of feeling and living individual tone. An admirable
portrait of a lady, with no end of finish and style, is thereby
projected, and if I don't stop now, I shall be calling it a
regular masterpiece.
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