The narrator has to fill in for a friend and write an article about Hugh Vereker’s latest novel. When the author meets the narrator, he says that the critic is good, but that everyone is missing something, the figure in the carpet, that connects all his books. The rest of the novella is an attempt to find that figure. This is the first Henry James I have read, and I found the writing very beautiful, even though the outcome of the stories is highly frustrating. I must try one of James’s ‘real’ novels some day.
“For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were all so blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another himself. “It’s the very string,” he said, “that my pearls are strung on!”