Twenty-eight
When, after the theatre, a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory in the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals? There is something in the enforced bend of one’s head as one steps in. And when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap——
Twenty-nine
Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can’t satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers; it isn’t content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, “I’ve had enough of this.”
Thirty
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterwards live finely.
[119]
December
One
To hear a master play a scale, to catch that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born—this is to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art.