ds of exotic muslin weave their scents and
suggestions through the sober-coloured stuff of everyday. Indeed, New
England as I have known her, both as a child in her chief and
representative city, and as a man in her farthest, least-spoiled
hamlets has always seemed to me far more complicated and mysterious,
far more vital and suggestive than her too-exclusively-spinsterly
chroniclers can comprehend.

I look to see the country turn back to New England, not only with
historic pride, but with a rich appreciation of its artistic
mother-land--not mistaking her for its bleak and apprehensive maiden
aunt!

I am far from her now, that old breeding ground of great, incisive
sons, that nest of passions so strong that only a grip of
granite--like her sea line--could master them (do you fancy, O
languorous, faded South, do you bellow, O strident, bustling West,
that because she neither sighed them nor trumpeted them, she had no
passions? _Allez, allez!_) but I can close my eyes at any moment and
smell the challenge of her Atlantic winds here on the Mediterranean
or feel the heady languor of her miraculous "Indian Summer" there in a
London drizzle. It is strange that I, who have said many unhandsome
things of her country as a whole, should thus rush into apologia for
my mother's birthplace. And yet to think of never having known
Margarita!

But of course I should have met her. She would have come to me walking
lightly out of the dim Algerian evening or bumped into me some morning
in Piccadilly or peered curiously through my leaded pane at Oxford,
whither I should undoubtedly have returned, one day, to muse away my
middle age. I idled for a happy year there, twenty-odd years ago,
while Roger was grinding away at the fantastic matter he called the
Law, and liked it well. But fate had not decreed me for a conventional
Englishman, which I should doubtless have been, for as a boy I was
malleable to a degree, but had reserved me instead for the ends of the
earth--and Margarita.

CHAPTER IV

FATE REELS IN

There is nothing more certain than that the bare facts of life are
misleading in the extreme. This is doubtless nature's reason for
concealing the human skeleton; it is undeniably necessary, but not
many of us take it into daily consideration, and nobody but a few
negligible anthropologists would dream of bringing it forward as proof
of anything in particular. And yet people who are fond of describing
themselves as prac