straight from life) such a constituted, animated figure or form. The figure has to that extent, as you see, _been_ placed--placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an "advance" on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare little "piece" left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the speculative amateur, and which is already there to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a cupboard-door. 

That may he, I recognize, a somewhat superfine analogy for the particular "value" I here speak of, the image of the young feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at my disposal; but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact--with the recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right. 

I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to "realize," resigned to keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather than commit it, at no matter what price, to vulgar hands. For there _are_ dealers in these forms and figures and treasures capable of that refinement. 

The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large building of "The Portrait of a Lady." It came to be a square and spacious house--or has at least seemed so to me in this going over it again; but, such as it is, it had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. 

That is to me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of interest; for I have lost myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analyzing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?--and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? 

Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? 

The novel is of its very nature an "ado," an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for--for positively organizing an ado 

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