illusively, to the aristocracy of genius.  To find the just word for all our emotions, to realise that our most trivial thought is illimitably creative, to feel that it is our lot to keep life’s gladdest promises, to see the great souls of men and women, steadfast in existence as stars in a windless pool—­these, indeed, are no ordinary pleasures.  Moreover, these hours of our illusory greatness endow us in their passing with a melancholy that is not tainted with bitteress.  We have nothing to regret; we are in truth the richer for our rare adventure.  We have been permitted to explore the ultimate possibilities of our nature, and if we might not keep this newly-discovered territory, at least we did not return from our travels with empty hands.  Something of the glamour lingers, something perhaps of the wisdom, and it is with a heightened passion, a fiercer enthusiasm, that we set ourselves once more to our life-long task of chalking pink salmon and pinker sunsets on the pavements of the world.

I once met an Englishman in the forest that starts outside Brussels and stretches for a long day’s journey across the hills.  We found a little cafe under the trees, and sat in the sun talking about modern English literature all the afternoon.  In this way we discovered that we had a common standpoint from which we judged works of art, though our judgments differed pleasantly and provided us with materials for agreeable discussion.  By the time we had divided three bottles of Gueze Lambic, the noble beer of Belgium, we had already sketched out a scheme for the ideal literary newspaper.  In other words, we had achieved friendship.

When the afternoon grew suddenly cold, the Englishman led me off to tea at his house, which was half-way up the hill out of Woluwe.  It was one of those modern country cottages that Belgian architects steal openly and without shame from their English confreres.  We were met at the garden gate by his daughter, a dark-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, so unreasonably beautiful that she made a disillusioned scribbler feel like a sad line out of one of the saddest poems of Francis Thompson.  In my mind I christened her Monica, because I did not like her real name.  The house, with its old furniture, its library, where the choice of books was clearly dictated by individual prejudices and affections, and its unambitious parade of domestic happiness, heightened my melancholy.  While tea was being prepared Monica showed me the garden.  Only a few daffodils and crocuses were in bloom, but she led me to the rose garden, and told me that in the summer she could pick a great basket of roses every day.  I pictured Monica to myself, gathering her roses on a breathless summer afternoon, and returned to the house feeling like a battened version of the Reverend Laurence Sterne.  I knew that I had gathered all my roses, and I thought regretfully of the chill loneliness of the world that lay beyond the limits of this paradise.