It represents, for that matter, one of the identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him; but it all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her leaving her chair.

It is obviously the best thing in the book, but it is only a supreme illustration of the general plan.

As to Henrietta, my apology for whom I just left incomplete, she exemplifies, I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only an excess of my zeal.

So early was to begin my tendency to OVERTREAT, rather than undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject.
(Many members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) "Treating" that of "The Portrait" amounted to never forgetting, by any lapse, that the thing was under a special obligation to be amusing.

There was the danger of the noted "thinness"-- which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by cultivation of the lively.