chief accountant. Not, however, that the chief
accountant hasn't his gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at least the
equilibrium, of the artist's state dwells less, surely, in the further
delightful complications he can smuggle in than in those he succeeds in keeping
out. He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a crop; wherefore yet again, like
the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he must keep his head at any price. In
consequence of all which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to
have my choice of narrating my hunt for Lambert Strether, of describing the
capture of the shadow projected by my friend's anecdote, or of reporting on the
occurrences subsequent to that triumph. But I had probably best attempt a little
to glance in each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this
licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or conceivable, has
been only half-emptied by the mere telling of one's story. It depends so on what
one means by that equivocal quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and
then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story
itself. I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist, and
the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as really the more
objective of the two.
    The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour there,
amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have been then, on behalf of
my man of imagination, to be logically and, as the artless craft of comedy has
it, led up to; the probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a
predicament, would have in short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from
and why has he come, what is he doing (as we Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in
our foredoomed clutch of exotic aids to expression) in that galère? To answer
these questions plausibly, to answer them as under cross-examination in the
witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in other words satisfactorily to
account for Strether and for his peculiar tone, was to possess myself of the
entire fabric. At the same time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a
certain principle of probability: he wouldn't have indulged in his peculiar tone
without a reason; it would take a felt predicament or a false position to give
him so ironic an