r and matter, yet did something altogether
different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by
all that sterile modern complication, by my "originality," as the
newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons
of his _Well at the World's End_ or his _Waters of the Wondrous Isles_,
always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk
his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary
inhabitants, half-planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began
drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of "the mask" which has convinced
me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or
philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were,
linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds
images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the
naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman
emperor's image in his head and some condottiere blood in his heart; and
when he crowned that head at Rome with his own hands he had covered, as
may be seen from David's painting, his hesitation with that emperor's old
suit.

XV

I had various women friends on whom I would call towards five o'clock
mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without
meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast
saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but with women, apart from their
intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a
seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls
sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to
one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and
presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since
then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young.
Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for
hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at
other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity
mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo
in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little
island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick
I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which
balanced a little ball upon its j