WHAT could we have done without it?
It's as somebody said about something else one time — if we hadn't had it, you know, it would have been necessary to invent it, though for the life of me, I can't remember who it was or what he said about it. Although likely it was Madame de Stael. We took her up once and it developed that she had said a most surprising number of things like that things, you know, that would be quite quotable if you could only remember them.
Isn't memory a wonderful facility, though?
I've always intended to go in for developing mine systematically and scientifically.
But I've never done it because I always forget whether I should order the book-shop people to send home a work on numismatics or a work on mnemonics. One of them is about money, you know, and the other is about memory. And once when I was shopping and thought I had it right it turned out — the book did, when I got it home — to be all about air and things. Pneumatics, you know! Wasn't it perfectly ridiculous?
But, of course, one learns by one's mistakes.
Have you seen dear Nijinsky?
We were discussing him last evening — our little group, you know — and decided that while he has more Personality than Mordkin he has less Temperament, if you get what I mean.
One of the girls said last evening, "Mordkin is more exotic, but Nijinsky is more esoteric."
And another said, "One of them shows intellect obviously mingled with spirit, but the other shows spirit occultly mingled with intellect."