I was alone, awaiting Clarissa for tea. I had actually prepared tea since she never drank alcohol and I myself was a light drinker at best ... a non-drinker that summer when my liver rested (so powerful is imagination) like a brazen cannonball against the cage of bones. I sat on my porch which overlooked the lawn and the water; unlike the other houses on that river, mine had the railroad behind it instead of in front of it, an agreeable state of affairs; I don’t mind the sound of trains though the sight of them on their squalid tracks depresses me. Beside me, among the careful tray of tea things, the manuscript of my dialogue lay neglected. I had not yet made up my mind whether to read it to Clarissa or not. Such things tended to bore her; yet, if she could be enticed into attention, her opinion would be useful: such a long memory of old customs would be invaluable to me as I composed, with diligence rather than inspiration, an ethical system whose single virtue was that it tended to satisfy the needs of human beings as much as was possible without inviting chaos. I had, that morning over coffee, abolished marriage. During lunch, served me by my genteel but impoverished housekeeper (although servants still existed in those days in a few great houses, people like myself were obliged to engage the casual services of the haughty poor), I decided to leave marriage the way it was but make divorce much simpler. After lunch, suffering from a digestive-inspired headache, I not only abolished marriage again but resolutely handed the children over to the impersonal mercies of the state. Now, bemused, relaxed, my eyes upon the pale blue Catskills and the summer green, the noise of motorboats like great waterbugs in my ears, I brooded upon the implications of what I was doing and, though I was secretly amused at my own confidence, I realized, too, that what I felt and did and wrote, though doubtless unorthodox to many, was, finally, not really the work of my own inspiration but a logical result of all that was in the world: a statement of the dreams of others which I could formulate only because I shared them. Cave regarded his own words as revelation when, actually, they only echoed the collective mind, a plausible articulation of what most men felt even though their conscious minds were antipathetic, corseted and constricted by stereotyped ways of thinking, the opposite of what they truly believed.