I was not, I think, different in kind from the other children, except as being more consistently immersed in it and never quite dispossessed. I have lost and rediscovered the way to it some several times; have indeed, had to defend its approaches with violence and skill: this whole business of the biography has no other point, in fact, than to show you how far my human behaviour has been timed to keep what I believe most people part with no more distressfully than with their milk teeth. Effie, I know, has no recollection of this period other than that there was a time when the earth was hung with vestiges of splendour, and if my brother has kept anything of his original inheritance, he would sooner admit to a left over appetite for jujubes and liquorice; for Forester is fully of the common opinion that the fevers, flights and drops of temperament are the mere infirmity of Gift. There was a time, before I left off talking to Forester at all about my work, when he visibly permitted his pity to assuage his disgust at the persistence of so patent a silliness in me, and still earlier, before I owned three motor cars, an estate in Florida and a house on the Hudson, there were not wanting intimations of its voluntary assumption as a pose; pose in Forester's vocabulary standing for any frame of behaviour to which he is not naturally addicted. But there it was, the flux of experience rising to the surface of our plays, the reservoir from which later, without having personally contemplated such an act, I drew the authority for how Lady Macbeth must have felt, about to do a murder, from which if I had had a taste for it, I might have drawn with like assurance the necessity of the square of the hypotenuse to equal the squares of the other two sides.