ogic.

"No," I answer, while the maggots madden me. "I know you for what you
are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself the
Noseless One and your way leads to the Night. Hedonism has no meaning.
It, too, is a lie, at best the coward's smug compromise."

"Now will I cap you!" the White Logic breaks in.

"But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
Without the fear of waking after death."

And I laugh my defiance; for now, and for the moment, I know the White
Logic to be the arch-impostor of them all, whispering his whispers of
death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own genial
chemistry turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots biting
alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again the old
voice from beyond of my youth, telling me again that still are mine the
possibilities and powers which life and the books had taught me did not
exist.

And the dinner gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass. Jeering
at the White Logic, I go out to join my guests at table, and with assumed
seriousness to discuss the current magazines and the silly doings of the
world's day, whipping every trick and ruse of controversy through all the
paces of paradox and persiflage. And, when the whim changes, it is most
easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and
cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting
god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom.

The clown's the thing! The clown! If one must be a philosopher, let him
be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am jingled. I am in
fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labour of thinking, and, when
the table is finished, start practical jokes and set all playing at
games, which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness.

And when the evening is over and good-night said, I go back through my
book-walled den to my sleeping porch and to myself and to the White Logic
which, undefeated, has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep I
hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it:

"I heard Youth calling in the night:
'Gone is my former world-delight;
For there is naught my feet may stay;
The morn suffuses into day,
It dare not stand a moment still
But must the world with light fulfil.
More evanescent than the rose
My sudden rainbow comes and goes,
Plunging