Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes to me, that to all these slaves of the _Elsinore_ the Real is real because they fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with the belief that they are free agents. To me the Real is unreal, because I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real. I, the super-realist, am the only unrealist on board the _Elsinore_. Therefore I, who penetrate it deepest, in the whole phenomena of living on the _Elsinore_ see it only as phantasmagoria. Paradoxes? I admit it. All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of contradictions. But all the others on the _Elsinore_, sheer surface swimmers, keep afloat on this sea—forsooth, because they have never dreamed its depth. And I can easily imagine what Miss West’s practical, hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of mine. After all, words are traps. I don’t know what I know, nor what I think I think. This I do know: I cannot orient myself. I am the maddest and most sea-lost soul on board. Take Miss West. I am beginning to admire her. Why, I know not, unless it be because she is so abominably healthy. And yet, it is this very health of her, the absence of any shred of degenerative genius, that prevents her from being great . . . for instance, in her music. A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to her playing. The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been of the best. To my astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr, and that her father took a degree from old Bowdoin long ago. And yet she lacks in her music. Her touch is masterful. She has the firmness and weight (without sharpness or pounding) of a man’s playing—the strength and surety that most women lack and that some women know they lack. When she makes a slip she is ruthless with herself, and replays until the difficulty is overcome. And she is quick to overcome it. Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no sentiment, no fire. When she plays Chopin, she interprets his sureness and neatness. She is the master of Chopin’s technique, but she never walks where Chopin walks on the heights. Somehow, she stops short of the fulness of music. I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my suggestion, to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies. On the Third Intermezzo she was at her best, and a good best it was. “You were talking of Debussy,” she remarked. “I’ve got some of his stuff here. But I don’t get into it. I don’t understand it, and there is no use in trying. It doesn’t seem altogether like real music to me. It fails to get hold of me, just as I fail to get hold of it.” “Yet you like MacDowell,” I challenged.