your little daily scrap be
something you've thought. What you've done belongs partly to some one
else; often you're made to do it. But what you think is you yourself:
you write it down and there it is, a tiny little bit of you that you can
look at and say, 'Well, really!' You see, a little bit like that,
written every day, is a mirror in which you can see your real self and
correct your real self. A looking-glass shows you your face is dirty or
your hair rumpled, and you go and polish up. But it's ever so much more
important to have a mirror that shows you how your real self, your mind,
your spirit, is looking. Just see if you can't do it. A little scrap.
It's very steadying; very steadying...."

And his small hearers, desiring, like young colts in a field, nothing so
little as anything steadying, paid as much attention to this "jaw" as to
any precept not supported by cane or imposition. They made of it,
indeed, a popular school joke, "Oh, go and write a little every day and
boil yourself, you ass!" But it appealed, dimly, to the reflective
quality in the child Sabre's mind. He contracted the habit of writing,
in a "bagged" exercise book, sentences beginning laboriously with "I
thought to-day--." It remained with him, as he grew up, in the practice
of writing sometimes ideas that occurred to him, as in the case of his
feelings about his books and--much more strongly--in deliberately
thinking out ideas.

"You yourself. The real you."

In the increasing solitariness of his married life, it came to be
something into which he could retire, as into a private chamber; which
he could put on, as a garment: and in the privacy of the chamber, or
within the sleeves of the garment, he received a sense of detachment
from normal life in which, vaguely, he pondered things.

VIII

Vaguely,--without solution of most of the problems that puzzled him, and
without even definite knowledge of the line along which solution might
lie. Here, in these cloisters of another world--his own world--he paced
among his ideas as a man might pace around the dismantled and scattered
intricacies of an intricate machine, knowing the parts could be put
together and the thing worked usefully, not knowing how on earth it
could be done.... "This goes in there, and that goes in there, but how
on earth--?" Here, into these cloisters, he dragged the parts of all the
puzzles that perplexed him; his relations with Mabel; his sense, in a
hundred ways as they