And when I talk about my own doings or my personal sentiments, I momentarily detect myself in heightening, softening, or overcoloring the reality, as if in an instinctive effort to conform with what my hearer will, conceivably, expect and approve. Certainly not much of me gets into my conversation.... In writing, I do wax, as one might phrase it, bolder. This is largely fruit of my knowledge that to the persons among whom my physical existence is passed, my writing means nothing, or at most is visited now and then by an unardent glance, as a highly problematic source of income: the persons about whom alone I really care will never read whatever I may elect to publish, nor ever, if by some unforeseeable circumstances compelled to do so, could they take my nonsense seriously. I am thus at liberty to write, without incurring any discomforts of actual weight, whatever I may prefer. I am nowadays even sure of getting it printed. Yet when I reflect how little I find, in so much writing, of any candid and fair expression of that person whom I with real regret accept as myself,--in my own thoughts' very privately issued version, with so many unopened leaves and with such handsome margins of error,--why, then, I am somewhat astonished and vastly pleased.... I marvel at, for one thing, the maniacal zeal with which I have transferred the credit for almost every line I have written, to this or the other invented "authority" or narrator. I seem from the first thus to have hidden myself as if instinctively. And moreover, in the few nooks thus unprotected, I find I have, throughout the whole Biography, enacted one who is rather wiser and more amiable, and rather more clever and more sophisticatedly broad-minded and more freakish, than I can on any terms believe myself.... No: I am not intimate with the author of the Biography: and now and then I suspect a certain condescension in his manner, even toward me, because of my persistency in working for him so hard. And all these small deceits are benefactions for everybody concerned. But the point is that every person whom egoism reduces to writing, must aspire to, and the more adroit do truly succeed in, just this laborious form of suicide and self-interment, under the effigy they find diverting. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 9: Katherine Fullerton Gerould, a writer of the day, and the author of many stories so exactly in the best manner of Henry James that they well might actually have been written during the latter years of his life by Mrs. Edith Wharton.] [Footnote 10: Periodicals of the day, which occasionally published articles dealing with literary matters.] X FLAWS IN THE SPUR