Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/353

THE IVORY TOWER as may be what "happens" as the next step in my drama, the next Joint in the action after the climax of the "scene" with Rosanna. Obviously the first thing is a passage with Horton, the passage after, which shall be a pendant to the passage before. But don't I want some episode to interpose here on the momentous ground of the Girl? These sequences to be absolutely planned and fitted together, of course, up to their last point of relation; to work such complexity into such compass can only be a difficulty of the most inspiring—the prize being, naturally, to achieve the lucidity with the complexity. What then is the lucidity for us about my heroine, and exactly what is it that I want and don't want to show? I want something to take place here between Gray and her that crowns his vision and his action in respect to Horton. As I of course want every point and comma to be "functional", so there's nothing I want that more for than for this aspect of my crisis—which does, yes, decidedly, present itself before Gray has again seen Horton. I seem even to want this aspect, as I call it, to be the decisive thing in respect to his "decision". I want something to have still depended for him on the question of how she is, what she does, what she makes him see, however little intending it, of her sensibility to the crisis, as it were—knowing as I do what I mean by this. But what does come up for me, and has to be faced, is all the appearance that all 339