I have been happy these two years and more—happy in my fashion. In midst of the tumult and throb of the war spirit I, in common with other business men, have been buying and selling and chaffering and huckstering, rearing Laura’s children, educating Alicia and prospering. If newly rich labor has been buying motor cars, it must be admitted that some abruptly enriched business men and their wives have had time to turn from furs and bric-a-brac and interior decorating so far afield as my own remote specialty. They have been buying books—libraries by the yard, classics and first editions by the hundred. The fact that that admirable American book-man, the young Widener, had managed to gather a magnificent collection during his all too brief life, has stimulated many to emulation. Shelley need no longer weep for Adonais. I have sold collections of Keats _en bloc_ to gentlemen who have probably never read Endymion in their lives, and even now I am holding a set of Shelley first editions only because I could not bring myself to part with them to the very crude, almost illiterate, customer who proves to be the highest bidder. Rather would I sell them for less to a more enlightened bookman. Oh, yes, I have been happy in my fashion. Yet, glancing over the few brief scattering entries in this record, why does the tinge of melancholy persist? I find a quotation from Anatole France under date of some twenty-six months ago to the point that "even the most desired changes have their sadness, for all that we leave behind is a part of ourselves. One must die to one sort of life in order to enter another." What is it that I regret or regretted—unless it is the mere passage of time that makes me older and older? And again I find: "Life is a game best played by children and by those who retain the hearts of children. To those who have the misfortune to grow up it is often a nightmare." There it is again—the persistent note of regret. Time will take them all from me—all, including Alicia. And then?—How did I ever come to let passion steal into my heart? I find some phrases from Hazlitt to the effect that "we take a dislike to our favorite books after a time," and that "If mankind had wished for what is right they might have had it long ago," and then later, a sort of credo, or confession or apologia _pro vita mea_: "This is a commercial age. If business is the path of least resistance to a livelihood, so that a slenderly endowed creature like myself may cling to the surface of the planet and pass on what has been accomplished to the generations that must accomplish more—if that is the easiest way, then that is the way of nature, my way. All business may be more or less ignoble. But, if so, who in the present state of evolution can wholly escape the ignoble?"