Put it even that they are like the fishwives who helped to bring back to Paris from Versailles, on that most ominous day of the first half of the French Revolution, the carriage of the royal family.

The only thing is that I may well be asked, I acknowledge, why then, in the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade.
I will presently say what I can for that anomaly--and in the most conciliatory fashion.
A point I wish still more to make is that if my relation of confidence with the actors in my drama who WERE, unlike Miss Stackpole, true agents, was an excellent one to have arrived at, there still remained my relation with the reader, which was another affair altogether and as to which I felt no one to be trusted but myself.

That solicitude was to be accordingly expressed in the artful patience with which, as I have said, I piled brick upon brick.

The bricks, for the whole counting-over--putting for bricks little touches and inventions and enhancements by the way--affect me in truth as well-nigh innumerable and as ever so scrupulously fitted together and packed-in.

It is an effect of detail, of the minutest; though, if one were in this connexion to say all, one would express the hope that the general, the ampler air of the modest monument still survives.