The following passage appears at the beginning of the novel in TM, with some revision from MS; the first two paragraphs also appear in TB.
Concerning the beings categorised above it may be premised that of the aim and meaning of their appearance upon the earth, of what, in its highest sense, they came into the world to do—if much, if little, or whether to be only lookers-on and to do nothing at all—no analysis will be given. Even from their social life—a congeries of significant phenomena—we sip but a sweet or bitter here and there in flying along. In other words, on the subject only of some nodes in the orbits of their lives is it the province of this narrative to be diffuse.
Though the whole material and vehicle of the story is here before us in parvo, who shall put limits to the possible extent of good, bad, or indifferent circumstance that, in connection with these few persons and this narrow scene, may have arisen, declined, and been finally deposited in the Past as mere matter for inspection by eyes who know or care where to find it? If the reader has taken the trouble to look down the list with anything like kindly curiosity, and given a minute of his time to the idle imagination of why such a company was ever brought together by Fate, Chance, Law, or Providence, so much the better. He will perceive from their general standing, that three or four of them may have been capable characters, whose emotional experiences deserve record.
Elfride Swancourt is reading a romance.
She is sitting alone in the drawing-room of a remote country vicarage, hoping for a kindly ending to the story, or, as it is put in homely phrase, that it may end well.
It happened that she was to be disappointed. The title of the novel it is not worth while to give, but it detailed in its conclusion the saddest contretemps that ever lingered in a gentle and responsive reader’s mind since fiction has taken a turn—for better or worse—for analysing rather than depicting character and emotion.
Elfride was just dismissing the second volume—its crimson covers making one pale pink hand that clasped them as intensely white by their contrast as the pallid leaf underlying the other caused that to tinge itself almost rosy. She read on with a pulse which, as each leaf was turned, quickened with misgiving. She began to suspect the trick of the issue, and dreaded it—as an inexorable fate with regard to the imaginary beings therein concerned—as she dreaded a wasp’s sting in regard to herself.
She takes up the third volume, and opens it. The list of contents was disclosed, in which the author had, somewhat indiscreetly, too plainly revealed the sorrow that was impending. Elfride was too honest a reader to resolve her suspense into a more endurable certainty by taking a surreptitious glance at the end, yet too much of a woman to be satisfied with going straight on. Her eye strayed to the contents page to scan it, and so help her prognostication. No, even that was hardly fair: she would not look. She put her little palm over the relentless chapter-headings—to lift it after all, and look under at the suspicious group of terse phrases which meant so much to the initiated. Misgiving increased like Genevieve’s at her lover’s ditty of the Miserable Knight. Her heart still librating between hope and fear, fear permanently prevailed. Her hero died.
Elfride smothered an inward sigh and murmured, ‘What a weak thing I am!’
She never forgot that novel, and those minutes of sadness. Not that the story was the most powerful she had ever read; not that those tears were the bitterest that had ever flowed. But for this reason: that it was the last time in her life that her emotions were ever wound to any height by circumstances which never transpired; that the loves and woes, expectations and despairs, of imaginary beings were ever able so much to emulate her own experiences as to make a perceptible difference to her state of mind for a whole afternoon.
The following appears in MS, TM and TB (with slight variations) after the first sentence of the present second paragraph.
Will it be necessary to thrust her forward in the garish daylight, and describe her points as categorically as Cleopatra’s messenger described Octavia’s? Hardly. It might vulgarise her, and rob her of some of the sweetness which the stolen glimpses only that will for the present be taken may serve to heighten. For instance, the height of her forehead; the shape of her nose. These things may never be learnt to the very last page of this narrative.
There is, however, something more than the respect and love of her biographer to prompt this reticence.