They were in their garden unconscious of me and I was unconscious of a dinner being put on a table downstairs in my house, unconscious of any need of food I would ever feel again, unconscious of the regime of my own household, of the affairs of my factory. A man and a woman in a garden had become the centre of a universe about which it seemed to me I might think and feel in joy and wonder forever. People had outer motives that seemed to control their lives. Under certain circumstances they said certain words. Stealthily I went to lock the door of my room. A domestic regime would be upset by my determination, the affairs of a certain factory might be ruined by my inattention but what did all that, at the moment, matter to me? I became cruelly impersonal and could not avoid becoming so. Had a god been in my way or intent on disturbing me just then I would have at least tried to brush him aside. “You Jove, sit in that chair over there and keep your mouth shut! You Minerva, get down that stairway, go into the front room of my house and sit in a rocking-chair with your hands folded until I have attended to the business before me! At the moment I am concerned with a man standing in a potato patch with a can of potato bugs held in his hand and with a certain perplexed baffled look in his eyes and in the eyes of the wife in a gingham apron who is unnecessarily angry about a trifling matter of sugar not brought home from a store. You must see that I am a swimmer and have stripped myself of the clothes which are my ordinary life. You, my dear Minerva, should not stay in the presence of a naked man. People will say things about you. Get down the stairway at once. I am a swimmer and am about to leap off into the sea of lives, into the sea of present-day American lives. Will I be able to swim there? Will I be able to keep my head above water? That is a matter for greater gods than yourself to decide. Get out of here!” * * * * * Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why could not one cling to that? Why the later vanity that made one want to be proclaimed? I remember an evening alone in my room. I was not always writing. Sometimes I read the work of other men. There was a scene being depicted by an old master of prose. Three men were in a little room talking. What was attempted was that there should be actual words said while the reader should be given the sense of things felt for which there were no words. One of the men kept talking in the most affable and genial manner while at the same time there was murder in his heart. The three had been eating and now the man who wanted to kill was fingering the handle of a knife.