I have had in the last few days some difficulty in avoiding the company of Mr. Butler. Fortunately, he is now very much involved with the local functionaries and I am again able to return to my narrative. I don’t think Butler has been sent here to assassinate me but, on the other hand, from certain things he has said and not said, I am by no means secure in his ignorance; however, one must go on. At best, it will be a race between him and those hardened arteries which span the lobes of my brain. My only curiosity concerns the arrival next week of his colleague who is, I gather, of the second generation and of a somewhat bookish turn according to Butler who would not, I fear, be much of a judge. Certain things, though, which I have learned during the last few days about Iris Mortimer make me more than ever wish to recall our common years as precisely as possible for what I feared might happen has indeed, if Butler is to be believed, come to pass, and it is now with a full burden of hindsight that I revisit the scenes of a half century ago. 2 I had got almost nowhere with my life of Julian. I had become discouraged with his personality though his actual writings continued to delight me. As it so often happens in history I had found it difficult really to get at him: the human attractive part of Julian was undone for me by those bleak errors in deed and in judgment which depressed me even though they derived most logically from the man and his time: that fatal wedding which finally walls off figures of earlier ages from the present, keeping them strange despite the most intense and imaginative recreation. They are not we. We are not they. And I refused to resort to the low trick of fashioning Julian in my own image of him. I respected his integrity in time and deplored the division of centuries. My work at last came to a halt and, somewhat relieved, I closed my house in the autumn of the year and traveled west to California. I had a small income which made modest living and careful travel easy for me ... a fortunate state of affairs since, in my youth, I was of an intense disposition, capable of the passions and violence of a Rimbaud without, fortunately, the will to translate them into reality; had I had more money, or none, I might have died young, leaving behind the brief memory of a minor romanticist. As it was, I had a different role to play in the comedy; one for which I was, after some years of reading beside my natal river, peculiarly fitted to play.