y alone; or, if I can't do that, or the
weather sees to it that I shan't, I like to get by myself--anywhere to
dream, or, preferably, to explore some unknown district or street or
place in my own company. Sometimes I find that to open a new book or a
favourite old one, soon takes the edge off "edgyness," and makes me see
that the pin-pricks of life are merely pin-pricks, from which, unless
there are too many of them, I shan't die, however much I may suffer. But
even when reading--I like best to read alone--I am never really at ease
when at any moment a companion may suddenly break the silence and bring
me back to reality by asking the unseen listening gods "if they've locked
the cat out?" You condemn me? Well, perhaps I am wrong. And if you can
find happiness perpetually surrounded by people, then I envy you. It is
so much easier to go through life requiring nothing but food, friends,
and a bank balance, than always to hide misanthropic tendencies behind a
social smile. I envy you, because I realise that the fight to be alone,
the fight to be yourself, is the longest fight of all--and it lays you
open to suspicion, unfriendliness, even dislike, everywhere you go. But,
if I must be honest, I will confess that I _hate_ social pastimes. To
work and to dream, to travel, to listen to music, to be in England in the
springtime, to read, to give of myself to those who most specially need
me--if any there be?--that is what I now call happiness, the rest is
merely boredom in varying degree. My only regret is that one has
generally to live so long to discover what the constituents of happiness
are, or what is worth while and what worthless; what makes you feel that
the everyday is a day well spent, and not a day merely got through
somehow or other. You lose so much of your youth, and the best years of
your life, trying to find happiness along those paths where other people
informed you that it lay. It takes so many years of experience to
realise that most of the things which men call "pleasure" are but, as it
were, tough dulness covered with piquant sauce--a tough mess of which,
when you tire of the piquant sauce the toughness remains just so long as
you go on trying to eat it.

_Over the Fireside_

Most especially do I feel sorry for those people who cannot find a
certain illusion of happiness in reading. I thank whatever gods there be
that I can generally find the means of "getting-away" between the covers
of