le glim, but ready to flood
instantly and founder us in original gloom.

The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in
torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a
moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The
shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks
at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy
of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a
golden lily on a silver stem!

"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I
nearly replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife;
but that is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea
was that the bed-book is a soporific, and for that reason she even
advocated the reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute
act. Certainly you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You
would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not
only unshriven, but in the act of guilt.

What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or
a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are
no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have
named are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess
at times they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as
ours, their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my
part, they are too big for bedfellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my
feeble and restricted glim, following (in pyjamas) the statuesque
figure of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere
pity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after
midnight! Let those go who like it.

As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all,
including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid
tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismatic
spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball
below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that.
It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime
on fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By
breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should
all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once
the pillow is nicely set.

For the truth is, there are tim