I once longed to unhook the sun from the wall of the firmament and now I would fain crawl into a certain sultry crevice. The prism of desire deceives the Jasons in search of the golden--or brunette--fleece. I have made love to virtuous women who gave me the sensation of the force and felicity that attends the commission of a rape. And the pure woman who teases is worse than a streetwalker. A course of anatomy on a pillow, says a fellow cynic. Ah! the rapture of her little solitudes, her ivory tower, her mimique in the "naked war." In this life all the rest is gesticulation or secular sorrow. Ideas may be domesticated like cats. The pathos of distance--memorable phrase of Nietzsche--boasts its obverse, the bathos of propinquity--Walter Littlefield's mot. Some men look like a carefully pared thumb-nail; perhaps they are; anyhow, it's better than being a noble débris. Lawyers earn their bread in the sweat of their brow-beating. Fais aux autres ce que tu ne veux pas qu'ils te fassent! Pity is inutile. Every one of our actions is an addition. Why then worry over free-will? Not to animal life, nor to machinery must we go when studying the human heart, but to vegetables and flowers. I believe that romantic feelings are much less common than we imagine; the vast majority of the race mimic the gestures of the stage and fiction. Food, shelter, fornication, the fight for daily existence--these are the prime levers; not sentiment. We fool ourselves. We take our religion and sentiment in small doses. There are souls of prey like birds of prayer. Few women are in harmony with the moral landscape. What music is comparable to the exquisite sighs of a woman satisfied? The orchestra of her soul and sensations plays a triumphant fortissimo, and what a cruel, piercing note is the supreme spasm; the entire gamut of dolor is compressed therein.