hy. We will do as we would be done by. If there is ever going to
be any possible comfort in this world for me, in not being what I ought
to be, it is the thought that I am not the only one that knows it. At
all events, this feeling that the worst is known, even if one takes, as
I am doing now, a planet for a confessional, gives one a luxurious
sense--a sense of combined safety and irresponsibility which would not
be exchanged for a world. Every book should have I-places in
it--breathing-holes--places where one's soul can come up to the surface
and look out through the ice and say things. I do not wish to seem
superior and I will admit that I am as respectable as anybody in most
places, but I do think that if half the time I am devoting, and am going
to devote, to appearing as modest as people expect in this world, could
be devoted to really doing something in it, my little modesty--such as
it is--would not be missed. At all events I am persuaded that
anything--almost anything--would be better than this eternal keeping up
appearances of all being a little less interested in ourselves than we
are, which is what Literature and Society are for, mostly. We all do it,
more or less. And yet if there were only a few scattered-along places,
public soul-open places to rest in, and be honest in--(in art-parlours
and teas and things)--wouldn't we see people rushing to them? I would
give the world sometimes to believe that it would pay to be as honest
with some people as with a piece of paper or with a book.

I dare say I am all wrong in striking out and flourishing about in a
chapter like this, and in threatening to have more like them, but there
is one comfort I lay to my soul in doing it. If there is one thing
rather than another a book is for (one's own book) it is, that it
furnishes the one good, fair, safe place for a man to talk about himself
in, because it is the only place that any one--absolutely any one,--at
any moment, can shut him up.

This is not saying that I am going to do it. My courage will go from me
(for saying I, I mean). Or I shall not be humble enough or something and
it all will pass away. I am going to do it now, a little, but I cannot
guarantee it. All of a sudden, no telling when or why, I shall feel that
Mysterious Person with all his worldly trappings hanging around me again
and before I know it, before you know it, Gentle Reader, I with all my I
(or i) shall be swallowed up. Next time I appear, you shal