You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three "playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going to have--what magnificently wicked fun!