Either I've made a mistake in coming to New York, or else I'm going soft in the upper-story, he said aloud, as he opened his portfolio, crammed with papers, some scribbled over, some blank, some carefully folded. There is Edgar Saltus, who knows life in a broader sense, perhaps better, than De Gourmont--he says I made a mistake. Is Paris my real home, and am I deracinated as Maurice Barrès calls it, and only transplanted in America? Ah! abominable music-critics' jargon, how glad I am to have escaped your adjectives and repulsive technical terms. That is no way to find one's individuality, overpraising vain screaming sopranos, voluptuous contraltos--I wonder why contraltos are more temperamental than sopranos? worst of all those monkey tenors, with their lascivious bleatings like goats in rut. Why do women admire the miserable, whitewash whinneying of tenor singers? Baritones and basses are at least virile. Whether or not the tenor is castrated, he sings like a eunuch. No, they adore the eunuch voice in preference. Thank Apollo, I'm through with the lot, though dramatic criticism isn't much better. In the concert-world one at least listens to good music. A good play in New York is as rare as a well-written critique. I'm afraid that criticism is a poor proving-ground for one's intellectual development. Let me see what I've written the last few months. Only notations. This romantic rot must stop. Mona--oh, Mona is all right, but the waste of time, the waste of emotion. What of those factors? No women! Balzac had sternly warned Théophile Gautier. The Emperor Honoré did not practise what he preached. Compact of sex himself he was ever preoccupied with petticoats. La crise juponnière overtook him once a week and oftener. Ulick recalled an anecdote of the great man when, after he had succumbed to the blind fury of eroticism--a chambermaid, or somebody feminine had crossed his path--he went about the boulevards bemoaning to his friends: "J'ai perdu un livre, j'ai perdu un livre!" his theory being that an orgasm valued an entire story, and in his case it may have. Save your seed for nobler purposes than copulation. That is the wisdom of the sages. And the transposition so painfully accomplished by the saints of all times, climes and creeds, has ever impressed mankind as a deed heroic. Women secretly admire the chaste man. He is a sum of ineluctable forces. Men deride the Josephs and Parsifals, not crediting them with self-control. But that is nonsense, asserted Ulick. A priest here and there succumbs, but as a rule, and notwithstanding the atrocious martyrdom of unsatisfied legitimate desires, the sacerdotal man emerges from the trial a conqueror. As for women, they are the self-contained sex. No one knows precisely what happens in the alchemy of their emotions. Some burn their smoke, others blaze coram publico; but the majority hide this sort of light under a bushel of hypocritical reservations.