I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I don't see how I could do it by letting him cripple me.
I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do; I merely do not respect 'em. In some serious matters (relig.) I would have them burnt.
I am old now and once was a sinner. I often think of it with a kind of soft regret. I trust my days are numbered. I would not have that detail overlooked.
She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young; & I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from decay.
He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas that came to him—moral ideas, he called them. One fancy which he followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her mother with difficult questionings.—[Under Appendix w, at the end of this volume, the reader will find one of the “Bessie” dialogues.]—He read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked neither logic nor humor.
Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to satisfy him in the end.
Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable to bring to any conclusion. Both of these have been mentioned in former chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a mysterious visitant from another realm. He had experimented with each of these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow fallen short of his conception. “The Mysterious Stranger” in one of its forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that he could probably end it without much labor. He discussed something of his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion. But I suppose he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him to complete it.
CCLXXXIII. ASTRONOMY AND DREAMS
August 5, 1909. This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert's Salammbo which I recently lent him. I asked if he liked it.