I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I had enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves! And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears--a moral as well as a physical victory for a timid conservative. CHAPTER XXX PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING (From the editorial page of the New York _Sun_, December 31, 1916) It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle that we know you for what you are--the profoundest instinct of life: its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now, all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and Space. Nature clothes the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religion is first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation, and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe that the devil deserves the hindmost. We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues. Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness, wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.