Page:The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan, 1922).djvu/35

 subject-matter, and in the mantle of iridescence naturally and logically so produced. Julia is "foreshortened," I admit, to within an inch of her life; but I judge her life still saved and yet at the same time the equal desideratum, its depicted full fusion with other lives that remain undepicted, not lost. The other lives, the rest of the quantity of life, press in, squeeze forvvard, to the best of their ability; but, restricted as the whole thing is to implications and involutions only, they prevail at best by indirectness; and the bid for amusement, the effect presumably sought, is by making us conceive and respond to them, making us feel, taste, smell and enjoy them, without our really knowing why or how. Full-fed statement here, to repeat my expression—the imaged résumé of as many of the vivifying elements as may be coherently packed into an image at once—is the predominant artifice; thanks to which we catch by the very small reflector, which is of absolutely minimum size for its task, a quite "unlikely" amount, I surmise, of the movement of life. But, again and again, it would take me long to retail the refinements of ingenuity I felt poor re-invoked Juha all anxiously, all intelligently invite me to place, for this belated, for this positively final appearance, at her disposal. "Here we are again!" she seemed, with a chalked grimace, to call out to me, even as the clown at the circus launches the familiar greeting; and it was quite as if, while she understood all I asked of her, I confessed to her the oddity of my predicament. This was but a way, no doubt, of confessing it to myself—except indeed that she might be able to bear it. Her plea was—well, anything she would; but mine, in return, was that I really didn't take her for particularly important in herself, and would in fact have had no heart for her without the note, attaching to her as not in the least xxix