It was clearly to work to a charm and, during this process--by calling at every step for an exquisite management--"to haunt, to startle and waylay." Each of my "lamps" would be the light of a single "social occasion" in the history and intercourse of the characters concerned, and would bring out to the full the latent colour of the scene in question and cause it to illustrate, to the last drop, its bearing on my theme.

I revelled in this notion of the Occasion as a thing by itself, really and completely a scenic thing, and could scarce name it, while crouching amid the thick arcana of my plan, with a large enough O.The beauty of the conception was in this approximation of the respective divisions of my form to the successive Acts of a Play--as to which it was more than ever a case for charmed capitals.

The divine distinction of the act of a play--and a greater than any other it easily succeeds in arriving at--was, I reasoned, in its special, its guarded objectivity.

This objectivity, in turn, when achieving its ideal, came from the imposed absence of that "going behind," to compass explanations and amplifications, to drag out odds and ends from the "mere" storyteller's great property-shop of aids to illusion: a resource under denial of which it was equally perplexing and delightful, for a change, to proceed.

Everything, for that matter, becomes interesting from the moment it has closely to consider, for full effect positively to bestride, the law of its kind.