l, because
I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional
escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely to
the wheel of the Real. I, the super-realist, am the only unrealist on
board the _Elsinore_. Therefore I, who penetrate it deepest, in the
whole phenomena of living on the _Elsinore_ see it only as
phantasmagoria.

Paradoxes? I admit it. All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of
contradictions. But all the others on the _Elsinore_, sheer surface
swimmers, keep afloat on this sea--forsooth, because they have never
dreamed its depth. And I can easily imagine what Miss West's practical,
hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of mine. After all,
words are traps. I don't know what I know, nor what I think I think.

This I do know: I cannot orient myself. I am the maddest and most sea-
lost soul on board. Take Miss West. I am beginning to admire her. Why,
I know not, unless it be because she is so abominably healthy. And yet,
it is this very health of her, the absence of any shred of degenerative
genius, that prevents her from being great . . . for instance, in her
music.

A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to her
playing. The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been of the
best. To my astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr,
and that her father took a degree from old Bowdoin long ago. And yet she
lacks in her music.

Her touch is masterful. She has the firmness and weight (without
sharpness or pounding) of a man's playing--the strength and surety that
most women lack and that some women know they lack. When she makes a
slip she is ruthless with herself, and replays until the difficulty is
overcome. And she is quick to overcome it.

Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no
sentiment, no fire. When she plays Chopin, she interprets his sureness
and neatness. She is the master of Chopin's technique, but she never
walks where Chopin walks on the heights. Somehow, she stops short of the
fulness of music.

I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my
suggestion, to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies. On the Third
Intermezzo she was at her best, and a good best it was.

"You were talking of Debussy," she remarked. "I've got some of his stuff
here. But I don't get into it. I don't understand it, and there is no
use in tryin