your shoulder and I am loath to take it
off. For a while I would like what cannot be, to travel with you the
red-brown country-roads fragrant with hay, to cross the stiles and knock
upon the cabin doors, and enter where sorrow and where gladness is, big
with greeting and sure of welcome. I have often pleased myself with the
fancy that the outer aspects of life are patterned after the inner, so
that in the map of the spirit are to be found city and country, wood,
desert, and sea, so that we know these outer worlds through having
travelled the worlds within. Though I stay behind, my eyes can follow
you from this night's landmark along the stretch, on to the city
avenues, up the highways, tracing the twists of the bypaths, clambering
untrod trails of wilderness and mountain, on, on, till out upon the sea.

In one of the near turnings a woman with waiting face smiles subtly. Her
hands beckon you to the tryst. Godspeed, my son.

DANE.

XXVIII

FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON

THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
August 6, 19--.

As I have constantly insisted, our difference is temperamental. The
common words we lay hold of mean one thing to you and another thing to
me. I do not equivocate when I say that love is instinctive, and that
the latter-day expression of love is artificial. "Art," as I understand
the term in its broadness, contradistinguishes from nature. Whatever man
contrives or devises is an artifice, a thing of art not of nature, and
therefore artificial.

As for ourselves, among animals we are the only real inventors and
artificers. Instead of hair and hide, we have soft skins, and we weave
cunning textures and wear wondrous garments. In cold weather, in place
of eating much fat meat, we keep ourselves warm by grate fires and
steam heat. We cut up our blood-dripping meat chunks with pieces of iron
hardened by fire and sharpened by stone, and we eat fish with a fork
instead of our fingers. We put a roof over our heads to keep out storm
and sunshine, sleep in pent rooms, and are afraid of the good night air
and the open sky. In short, we are consummately artificial.

As I recollect, I have shown that the natural expression of the love
instinct is bestial and brutal and violent. I have shown how imagination
entered into the development of the expression of this love instinct
till it became _romantic_. And, in turn, I have shown how artificial was
the romantic expression of this love instinct, by is