what it will be like, or what has happened. Why can we not remember the faces of those we love? This is true: Their faces melt into a thousand shades and shapes and images of faces the moment that we try to fix them in our memory. It is only the face of a stranger we remember there. Why?
Never have the many-ness and the much-ness of things caused me such trouble as in the past six months. But never have I had so firm a conviction that our lives can live upon only a few things, that we must find them, and begin to build our fences.
All creation is the building of a fence.
But deeper study always, sharper senses, profounder living; never an end to curiosity!
The fruit of all this comes later. I must think. I must mix it all with myself and with America. I have caught much of it on paper. But infinitely the greater part is in the wash of my brain and blood.
Shaw makes a fool of himself when he writes of Napoleon, because he hates Napoleon and wants to make him ridiculous. But Shaw makes a hero of himself when he writes of Cæsar; Shaw’s Cæsar is the best Cæsar I know of. It beats Shakespeare. It is as Cæsar looks (Naples Museum), I am sure. I am sure Cæsar was like this.
But it is a mistake to suppose that Napoleon got his hair in the soup.
Dirge: Why are we unhappy?—I have no need to envy this man’s fame—nor skill to cloak myself in that man’s manner—I am as naked now as sorrow—and all I ask is: Why are we so unhappy?
Why are we unhappy?
In my father’s country there are yet men with quiet eyes and slow, fond, kindly faces.
LXXVI
About four o’clock on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1924, as Eugene was entering the Louvre, he met Starwick. Starwick was elegantly dressed, as always, in casual, beautifully tailored, brown tweed garments. He still carried a cane and twirled it indolently as he came down the steps. He was the same old picture of bored, languorous, almost feminine grace, but instead of a shirt he was wearing a Russian blouse of soft blue wool which snuggled around his neck in voluptuous folds
