You will still encounter me now and then, moving absently through the crowd, or wandering in some green place, as in the garden of the Luxembourg Vauvenargues used to meet the wounded of the great battle, keeping apart in the narrower walks, and leaving the broad central ways for lighter feet than theirs. He often longed to have speech with them; but always they turned away, with the proud self-sufficiency of the disillusioned. Perhaps if he had succeeded he would have found that to some of them life had its consolations not unlike mine, and that they could still regard it as something more than a friendly process of detachment. But it is not our habit to expand; we are ever held back by the occult pride which the same soldier-philosopher has assigned to one of his imaginary characters, "cette fierte tendre d'une ame timide, qui ne veut avouer ni sa defaite, ni ses esperances, ni la vanite de ses voeux." End of Project Gutenberg's Apologia Diffidentis, by W. Compton Leith