All was well. I knew I could revisit The Pines, when next Watts-Dunton
should invite me, without misgiving. And to this day I am rather proud
of having been mentioned, though not by name, and not consciously, and
unfavourably, by Swinburne.
I wonder that I cannot recall more than I do recall of those hours at
The Pines. It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how
few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and
how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am
middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one
third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual
number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was
unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course;
but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it;
strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that
of one's actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a
remnant clings about one! Of those hours at The Pines, of that past
within a past, there was not a minute nor a second that I did not
spend with pleasure. Memory is a great artist, we are told; she
selects and rejects and shapes and so on. No doubt. Elderly persons
would be utterly intolerable if they remembered everything.
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