But I at least, who have found human living and this world not wholly admirable, and who have here and there made formal admission of the fact, feel that in honor one ought to acknowledge all courtesies too. With life, then, I, upon the whole, have no personal quarrel: she has mauled, scratched and banged, she has in all ways damaged me: but she has permitted me to do that which I most wanted. So that I must be, I suppose, grateful.
—With which decision I very lightly pass my finger-tips across these fifteen book-backs; and touch in this small gesture, so didactically small, the whole of that to which, for good or ill, I have amounted. And thereafter (with a continuing sense of wholesome allegory) I go quietly to bed.
Dumbarton Grange,
30 April, 1924.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Nothing is known of him.
[15] Dr. Pattee is stated to have lectured professionally, at Pennsylvania State College, upon what patriotism described as American literature. He is known to have edited Shakespeare's Macbeth, and to have contributed to The American Mercury.
[16] Connected with Yale University.
[17] An English writer of some promise under the latter years of Victoria's reign.
[18] See note on Judge Leonard Doughty, page 288.
EXPLICIT