THERE gloomed at me my warning, as well as shone at me my provocation, in respect to the example of this delightful writer.

I might emulate her, since I presumptuously would, but dishonour would await me if, proposing to treat the different faces of my subject in the most completely instituted colloquial form, I should evoke the figure and affirm the presence of participants by the repeated and prefixed name rather than by the recurrent and affixed "said he" and "said she." All I have space to go into here--much as the funny fact I refer to might seem to invite us to dance hand in hand round it--is that I was at any rate duly admonished, that I took my measures accordingly, and that the manner in which I took them has lived again for me ever so arrestingly, so amusingly, on re-examination of the book.
But that I did, positively and seriously--ah so seriously!--emulate the levity of Gyp and, by the same token, of that hardiest of flowers fostered in her school, M.Henri Lavedan, is a contribution to the history of "The Awkward Age" that I shall obviously have had to brace myself in order to make.

Vivid enough to me the expression of face of any kindest of critics, even, moved to declare that he would never in the least have suspected it.

Let me say at once, in extenuation of the too respectful distance at which I may thus have appeared to follow my model, that my first care HAD to be the covering of my tracks--lest I truly should be caught in the act of arranging, of organising dialogue to "speak for itself." What I now see to have happened is that I organised and arranged but too well--too well, I mean, for any betrayal of the Gyp taint, however faded and feeble.

The trouble appears to have been that while I on the one hand exorcised the baleful association, I succeeded in rousing on nobody's part a sense of any other association whatever, or of my having cast myself into any conceivable or calculable form.