As in an eclipse the earth's shadow falls upon the moon, or as a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so a shadow fell, so from some morass of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I brushed them aside: they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the lovely mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested explanation of their gaze.
And anyhow—thus I laughed away the notion—how could she do it anyhow, even if she tried? Other people perhaps—but me? No, that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, "She mimics you to perfection," could be nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber. For who can turn the rainbow or the lightning-flash into ridicule, make fun of the moon's splendour, or mimic the Daystar in his shining?
Shrinkage
Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations, then all the vast life of the universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles, and of all that flood of thought which over-brimmed the great Cosmos there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.
The Lift
What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom, having completely forgotten the errand, which, just as I was going out, had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.
Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world bursting with misery, as Dr. Johnson describes it?
O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralizing way of regarding natural phenomena—this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestation of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law of gravitation—if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
The Danger of Going to Church
As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor laughing. Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers, remembering some maledictions from the Prophets, and from the Psalms we had sung that evening. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those bloody men and daughters of backsliding; their faces should become as flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their little ones should be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.