Dictation by Cynthia Ozick

this? What is to prevent him from discerning so bizarre an intrusion?"
    "A lack of suspicion, a lack of any expectation of the extraneous. Simply that—and something still more persuasive. The egoism of the artist. The greater the art, the greater the egoism—and the greater the assumptions of egoism. Mr. Conrad will read—he will admire—he will wonder at what he believes he has wrought—he will congratulate himself! Privately, in the way of the artist in contemplation of his art. And there it will rest, what you call foreign matter, foreign no more, absorbed, ingested, seamless—a kidnapped diamond to shine through the ages, and you and I, Lilian, will have set it there!"
    Theodora blazed; she was all theater; it seemed to Lilian that her fevered look, her shamelessly unbuttoned blouse, her untamed zeal, were more terrible than when Mrs. Patrick Campbell had pretended to be Lady Macbeth—but Theodora was not pretending.
    In her mother's flat wail Lilian asked, "And will you also take Mr. James for a dupe?"
    "Certainly not. Self-belief is no deception. It is how the artist's mind assimilates and transforms, and who has witnessed these raptures more than we?"
    "But what you want from me is a deception all the same. Why do you suppose I care to have any part in it?"
    "Because you do care. It means your triumph. Can't you
see,
Lilian? Mrs. Conrad exalts herself—how many times have I heard you complain of this?"
    "I complain only of her presumption."
    "Precisely. Her presumption in thinking that she has rightful possession of her husband's fecundity, that she is equal to its every motion, that she—she, a wife!—is the habitation of every word, and why? Because she sleeps in his bed. In his bed in the oblivion of night!—when it is you who in the light of day drink in the minutest vibrations of his spirit. What will Mrs. Conrad ever know of the kidnapped diamond? As long as you live, you will own this secret. If she demeans you, what will it matter? You have the hidden proof of her exclusion. Her exclusion! What deeper power than the power of covert knowledge? A victory, Lilian—see it, take it!"
    Lilian was silent. Then "Ah," she murmured. And again, as if born for the first time into airy breath, "Ah."
    Oh, easily, easily done! Lilian was satisfied, she was assuaged, she was enticed, she was caught; she was
in.
It was plain to Theodora that Miss Stephen ...
Ginny
... could not have been won over so readily. Miss Stephen was not so pliant. Miss Stephen was prone to mockery—she was no one's confederate, she went her own way. Sometimes, she said, she could hear the birds sing in Greek.
    ***
    And so Theodora's determined map, with its side roads and turnings, proceeded.
    "How fortuitous," she told Lilian, "to find ourselves so very far advanced even before we have rightly begun. We could not be better placed. This image of a strange and threatening alter ego—that two such illustrious minds should seize on an identical notion!"
    "But Mr. Conrad's is a tale of the sea," Lilian demurred.
    "That is why you must remember to keep clear of vistas—we cannot allow Mr. James's indoor characters to go wandering over Mr. Conrad's watery world. And the same with interiors: they must not fall into contradiction, a chimney-piece abutting a mast. As for names and dialogue, these too must be avoided—"
    "If we are to omit all that," Lilian argued, "what remains to be extracted?"
    The vexation of a dull counterpart. What would be the point of it all if the result were to fail of beauty, of artfulness?
    "The heart, the lung, the blood and the brain!" Theodora shot out. "What we mean to search for are those ruthless invokings, those densest passages of psychological terror that can chill the bone. Pick out a charged exactitude, tease out of your man the root of his fertility—"
    Theodora halted; she looked hard at Lilian: fearful dry celibate Lilian. How to arouse her to reckless