decision; there is time to forecast possibilities. Indeed, it is an
advantage for the solitary man to cultivate an over-elaborate way of
considering a subject, a slow picking-up and matching of patterns, a
maddening deliberation, simply by way of recreation. For a danger of
solitude, if one likes one's work, is that one works too much and too
hard. Then one writes too much, forgets to fill the cistern; one uses
up the old phrases, the old ideas. All which is a sore temptation to a
forgetful writer like myself, who re-invents and re-discovers the old
sentences with a shock of pleasing novelty and originality, only to
find it all written in an earlier book.

But these are all superficial material difficulties such as have to be
faced in every life. The real and dark danger of solitude is the
self-absorption that is bound to follow. With one like myself, to whom
the meeting of a new person is a kind of momentous terror, who feels
forced instinctively to use all possible arts to render a clumsy
presence and a heavy manner bearable, whose only hope is to be
respectfully tolerated, to whom society is not an easy recreation but
an arduous game, who would always sooner write a dozen letters than
have an interview, with such an one the solitary life tends to make one
ghost-like and evasive before one's time. Yet it is not for nothing, I
reflect, that Providence has never pushed a pawn to me in the shape of
an official wife, and has markedly withheld me from nephews and nieces.
It is not for nothing that relationships with others appear to me in
the light of a duty, at least in the initial stages, rather than a
pleasure.

And yet I reflect that I should doubtless be a better man, even with a
shrewish wife and a handful of heavy, unattractive children. I should
have to scheme for them, to make things easier for them, to work for
them, to recommend them, to cherish them, to love them. These dear
transforming burdens are denied me. And yet would the sternest and
severest mentor in the world bid me marry without love, for the sake of
its effect on my character? "No," he would say, "not that! but let
yourself go, be rash, fall in love, marry in haste! It is your only
salvation." But that is like telling a dwarf that it is his only
salvation to be six feet high--it cannot be done by taking thought. No
one can see more acutely and clearly, in more terrible and melancholy
detail, than myself what one misses. Call it coldness, call it