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 pilgrimages to the dingy cafe to pay homage to an optical illusion, was a type of all the poets and all the artists, of all the souls whose mission it is to transform the bogs of life into elysian fields for the feet of those who by keeping the faith have earned the right to walk in them.

Mondays come at well-ascertained intervals," he wrote to Geoffrey, "they always take me by surprise." And the explanation was that, while he had schooled himself to the rigors of his daily schedule, his week-ends, bringing as they did a surcease from the breaches of international law, were becoming more and more precious. A new spring was stealing into the city, nature was creeping over the cold pavements and up into the farthermost tips of the trees, and here he was two years older than he had been on another spring day when, walking across Boston Common with Rhoda Marple, he had heard little tunes from the Rondes de Printemps scuttle through his mind and come out on his lips in the form of an unbreathed ejaculation: If this were only Paris!

In the last few weeks his story had taken him firmly by the throat. Not that it was getting itself written;