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 when the flower blossomed. (I remember romantic nights during my furloughs in Paris when I paid mute tribute to long-haired, be-sandalled creatures who were, to my excessively English eyes, 'being individual'). But egos are passé; mass ego, it seems (or egi) have come in. For Dare the blossoming, even the fructifying, are incidental. His interest (at least in the reflective lulls after dinner, for during the daytime he's the most practical of men) extends to the cosmic activity which is (in some manner I have yet to comprehend) rendered possible by the virtually automatic living and procreating and dying of millions upon millions of violets and pine trees and rabbits and ladies and gentlemen and glaciers and republics and solar systems. He assaults the subject with these stimulating volleys of odds and ends.

"Now imagine, Walter, for only you can, the effect of all this on my wife. It's turning into 'a case unprecedented', and before long I may, like Bunthorne, have to be 'contented with a tulip or li-lie'. Louise long ago talked me into a cocked hat. Miriam, through the mysterious licence she had been endowed with, kept up a semblance of intellectual alto to Louise's dizzy soprano. But now, oh dear me now, Miriam and I aren't even in tempo with her, much less in key. My household,—I still claim it as mine through force of habit, which is always imperative with me,—has become a china shop for the