[The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James]@TWC D-Link bookThe Portrait of a Lady PREFACE 16/27
Well, I recall perfectly how little, in my now quite established connexion, the maximum of ease appealed to me, and how I seemed to get rid of it by an honest transposition of the weights in the two scales.
"Place the centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness," I said to myself, "and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.
Stick to THAT--for the centre; put the heaviest weight into THAT scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation to herself.
Make her only interested enough, at the same time, in the things that are not herself, and this relation needn't fear to be too limited.
Place meanwhile in the other scale the lighter weight (which is usually the one that tips the balance of interest): press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your heroine's satellites, especially the male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater one.
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