I thought of the couplet of Gay: 

  “He who would without malice pass his days
  Must live obscure and never merit praise.”

* * * * *

Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness.  Inwardly a panic had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone at night in a boundless forest ...  I have known that, too, but it is nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.

When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward.  And it has been said that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....

Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life that bulked on all sides ...  I saw that it was the object of education, not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to dead and commonplace formulae.

On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and creased ... which,—­now dead,—­it was pretended their spirits took up and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....

* * * * *

And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the fly in the ointment....

I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.

“Poet,” she had once said, “come to my place in the South.  I have a bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems unmolested ...  I won’t be going there for awhile yet, but I will give you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place.  And my pantry and ice box will be at your service ... so you’ll need do nothing but write.”

Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer.  And I wrote her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenuous letter, burning with naive love....

She had once told me how she had scandalised the neighbours by painting a little boy, in the nude, in that same bungalow ... the story being carried about by the servants ... and if it had not been for her social prestige!—­

I thought there could be nothing pleasanter than living in her place, perhaps becoming her lover....

I imagined myself posing, nude, for her canvases....

But my brief hope fell to earth.  A curt note from a married sister of hers ... who first apologised for having read my letter....  But Mrs. Tighe was abroad, painting in Spain.

The shock of having someone else, indubitably with a hostile eye, read my letter, in which I had poured forth all my heart, made me almost sick.  I was chagrined inexpressibly.

* * * * *

The truth was, spring was coming on.  Spring affects me as it does migratory fowls.  With its first effort of meadow and bough toward renewed flowers and greenness, the instinct for change and adventure stirs anew in me.