My ancestor could not have understood the Doll’s House while he was writing A Drama in Muslin, not even in Mr. Archer’s translation; he was too absorbed in his craft at that time, in observing and remembering life, to be interested in moral ideas.  And his portrait of Alice Barton gives me much the same kind of pleasure as a good drawing.  She keeps her place in the story, moving through it with quiet dignity, commanding our sympathy and respect always, and for her failure to excite our wonder like Nora we may say that the author’s design was a comedy, and that in comedy the people are not and perhaps should not be above life size.  But why apologize for what needs no apology?  Alice Barton is a creature of conventions and prejudices, not her mother’s but her own; so far she had freed herself, and it may well be that none obtains a wider liberty.  She leaves her home with the dispensary doctor, who has bought a small practice in Notting Hill, and the end seems a fulfilment of the beginning.  The author conducts her to the door of womanhood, and there he leaves her with the joys and troubles, no doubt, of her new estate; but with these he apparently does not consider himself to be concerned, though he seems to have meditated at this time a sort of small comedie humaine—­small, for he must have known that he could not withstand the strain of Balzac’s shifts of fourteen hours.  We are glad he was able to conquer the temptation to imitate, yet we cannot forego a regret that he did not turn to Violet Scully that was and look into the married life of the Marchioness of Kilcamey—­her grey intense eyes shining through a grey veil, and her delightful thinness—­her epicene bosom and long thighs are the outward signs of a temper, constant perhaps, but not narrow.  He would have been able to discover an intrigue of an engaging kind in her, and the thinking out of the predestined male would have been as agreeable a task as falls to the lot of a man of letters.  And being a young man he would begin by considering the long series of poets, painters and musicians, he had read of in Balzac’s novels, but as none of these would be within the harmony of Violet’s perverse humour, he would turn to life, and presently a vague shaggy shape would emerge from the back of his mind, but it would refuse to condense into any recognizable face; which is as well, perhaps, else I might be tempted to pick up this forgotten flower, though I am fain to write no more long stories.

But though we regret that the author of Muslin did not gather this Violet for his literary buttonhole, let no one suggest that the old man should return to his Springtime to do what the young man left undone.  Our gathering-time is over, and we are henceforth prefacers. The Brook Cherith is our last.  Some may hear this decision with sorrow, but we have written eighteen books, which is at least ten too many, and none shall persuade us to pick up the burden of another