Ah me! groaned the young man, as the light filtered through the curtains, here's another day, and I've been wasting good sleep over this twaddle instead of being in bed. But I couldn't sleep. Too much black coffee. It doesn't matter what. Only I wonder how many of these phrases are my own. I don't believe in originality. George Moore is quite right when he derides ideas; their expression is the only worth while to the artist prose. Truth--error? This side of the Pyrenees-- and the other side. Map-morality. He paused, and ruefully reflected: Nor can I say much for the formal quality of these phrases. Ah! the precious pagodas of prose, pagan and subtle, built by those master artificers, Renan, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès. Nevertheless, Stendhal, who wrote drily, whose books are psychological labyrinths, is their ruling sun, one that shines in a frosty heaven of his own fashioning. De Gourmont--a prober of the soul. Bourget, another, though more mundane, decorative. Maurice Barrès is a metaphysical Chopin in his feeling for nuance. He promenades his incertitudes through many pages of perverse, cadenced prose. But perverse. He has now deserted his ivory tower for another illusion like his "culte du moi;"--nationalism, patriotism, as opposed to egoism and cosmopolitanism. Well, I'm following in his footsteps, trying to become a sturdy American citizen in my native city--where I wasn't born. I'll stick. I like mince-pie, baseball and a good rough-neck prize-fight. I must be a real Yankee.