d conferred them upon him in the
first instant of creation. They constitute the law, and he could not
escape obedience to the decree any more than Paige could have built the
type-setter he invented, or the Pratt & Whitney machinists could have
invented the machine which they built."

He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his
words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them. He halted
in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added:

"What an amusing creature the human being is!"

It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and
personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and
manner which carried an ineffable charm. It was difficult, indeed, to
record the substance. I did not know shorthand, and I should not have
taken notes at such times in any case; but I had trained myself in
similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of
phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of
pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of
phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet,
the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed,
he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental
reflections; or I would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary
manuscripts where he had set them down himself, either before or after
he had tried them verbally. In these cases I have not hesitated to amend
my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even
so, there is always lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality.

CCXLV. IN THE DAY'S ROUND

A number of dictations of this period were about Susy, her childhood,
and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in
his chapters. More than once after such dictations he reproached himself
bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. He consoled himself a little
by saying that Susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth
and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which
might have made her childhood still more bright. Once he spoke of the
biography she had begun, and added:

"Oh, I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl's work! If I
had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her,
and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story
of me told i