In a wonderful passage from the Preface to Roderick Hudson, Henry James speaks of ‘developments’ as “the essence of the novelist’s process … the very condition of interest,” but also of his abiding “ache of fear … of being unduly tempted and led on by [these] developments.” For, he observes, “really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”1