mingled one in another, and that he to
whom books are less real than life will assuredly find in men and women
as little reality as in his accursed crassness he deserves to discover.'
I quailed, I quailed. But mine is a resilient nature, and I promptly
reminded myself that Swinburne's was a very impersonal one: he would not
think the less highly of me, for he never had thought about me in any
way whatsoever. All was well. I knew I could revisit The Pines, when
next Watts-Dunton should invite me, without misgiving. And to this day
I am rather proud of having been mentioned, though not by name, and not
consciously, and unfavourably, by Swinburne.

I wonder that I cannot recall more than I do recall of those hours at
The Pines. It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how
few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and
how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am
middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third
of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual number is
still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me
in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a
positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one
should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one's actual
happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings
about one! Of those hours at The Pines, of that past within a past,
there was not a minute nor a second that I did not spend with pleasure.
Memory is a great artist, we are told; she selects and rejects and
shapes and so on. No doubt. Elderly persons would be utterly intolerable
if they remembered everything. Everything, nevertheless, is just what
they themselves would like to remember, and just what they would like
to tell to everybody. Be sure that the Ancient Mariner, though he
remembered quite as much as his audience wanted to hear, and rather
more, about the albatross and the ghastly crew, was inwardly raging at
the sketchiness of his own mind; and believe me that his stopping only
one of three was the merest oversight. I should like to impose on the
world many tomes about The Pines.

But, scant though my memories are of the moments there, very full and
warm in me is the whole fused memory of the two dear old men that lived
there. I wish I had Watts-Dunton's sure faith in meetings beyond the
grave. I am glad I do not dis