or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion, dictating, suggesting, comparing, reminding, side-tracking, and that therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing in life is stable. Within the flux of our past and our present, figures outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and his memory. [Footnote 2: See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.] No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or understood. But to come to the women. A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden.