won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will
be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks,
and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct
colour--dim pinks and blues--which will, as time goes on, become more
definite, become--I don't know what....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be
caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left
over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper--look
at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they
say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly
refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to
think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to
have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another,
without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and
deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady
myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes....
Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat
himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so--A shower
of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his
mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through
the open door,--for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's
evening--But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't
interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought,
a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the
pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest
mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear
their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that
is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how
I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in
Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles
the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I
asked--(but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple
tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up
the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly
adoring it, for if I did that, I