I had, no doubt, a groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable to track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case stands, the general situation exhibited.

They are there, for what they are worth, and as numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to how and whence they came.
I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them--of Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer's history.

I recognised them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my "plot." It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in response to my primary question: "Well, what will she DO ?" Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them.

They were like the group of attendants and entertainers who come down by train when people in the country give a party; they represented the contract for carrying the party on.

That was an excellent relation with them--a possible one even with so broken a reed (from her slightness of cohesion) as Henrietta Stackpole.