This “detachment,” in the ignorant way I used it, was, perhaps, nothing less than shirking of the unpleasant. At twenty-three I had not yet discovered that better method which consists in facing the unpleasant without reservation or evasion, while raising the energy thus released into a higher channel, “transmuting” it, as the jargon of 1922 describes it. “Detachment,” however, even in its earliest stages, and provided it does not remain merely where it starts, is an acquisition not without value; it can lead, at any rate, to interesting and curious experiments. It deputes the surface-consciousness, or sufficient of it, to deal with some disagreeable little matter in hand, while the subconscious or major portion of the self--for those who are aware of possessing it--may travel and go free. It is, I think, Bligh Bond, in his “Gate of Remembrance,” who mentions that the automatic writer whose revelations are there given, read a book aloud while his hand with the pencil wrote. Many a literary man, whose inspiration depends upon the stirrings of this mysterious subconscious region, knows that to read a dull book, or talk to a dull person, engages just enough of his surface consciousness to set the other portion free. Reading verse--though not poetry, of course--has this effect; for some, a cinema performance, with the soothing dimness, the music, the ever-shifting yet not too arresting pictures, works the magic; for others, light music; for others, again, looking out of a train window. There are as many ways as individuals. To listen to Mrs. de Montmorency Smith telling her tedious dream, while you hear just enough to comment intelligently upon her endless details, even using some of these details to feed your own more valuable dream, is an admirable method--I am told; and my own childish habit of squeezing “through the crack between yesterday and to-morrow” in that horrible bed of East 19th Street, merely happened to be my own little personal adaptation of the principle.... Incidents that had held a touch of comedy remain more clearly in the memory than those that held ugliness and horror only. A member of the Reichstag Central Party, for instance, Rector Ahlwardt by name, came out to conduct a campaign against the Jews. He was violently anti-semitic. I was sent to meet his steamer at Quarantine because I could speak German, and my instructions were to warn him that America was a free country, that the Jews were honourable and respected citizens, and that abuse would not be tolerated for a moment. These instructions I carried out, while we drank white wine in the steamer’s smoking-room. Freytag, I noticed with amusement, himself a Jew, was there for the _Staatszeitung_.