the tracts of the Fabian Society, and the writings of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb.
There is always the moment when we must begin to write. There are always the hundreds, the thousands, of struggle, of getting up, of pacing about, of sitting down, of laborious uneven accomplishment. During the time of actual work, what else besides ourselves can help us? Can we call to mind then the contents of 20, 000 books? Can we depend on anything other than ourselves for help?
At La Régence:
How certain trivial words and phrases haunt the brain—cannot be forgotten—come back again even when years have passed. Today, have been hearing old voices, old songs, fleeting forgotten words of twenty years ago—my mother’s—my father’s—the voices of the summer boarders on the porches—most of all, Dinwood Bland, sitting in pleasant backyard of his house in Norfolk, a drink in his hand, his blind eyes blindly fixed upon the flashing sparkling waters of Hampton Roads, blindly on a white ship passing—his thin, senile, evil, strangely attractive face touched with bitterness, revulsion, and his weary disgust with life as he said:
“My father was an educated loafer.”
And now, all day long, “the sound of these words rings and echoes in my mind until I can listen to nothing else.” And sitting here I feel like Coleridge when the rhyme for Youth and Age came to him (10 Sept. 1823 Wed. morning 10 o’clock)—“An Air,” he says, “that whizzed dia engkefalou” (right across the diameter of my brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee—etc.
So too, with me, all afternoon—and Dinwood Bland’s haunting phrase about his father has now become:
"My father was an educated loafer, My mother was an alcoholic bum, My sister’s name was Nelly, she had a lovely belly, Aside from that she was a lousy scum.
“My brother Pete, he went and joined the Navy, My brother Hank, he went and caught the clap, My little sister Anny, fell down and bruised her fanny—Because
