Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/282

 anything there, or just sit still alone in the dusk, to feel ecstatically happy."

"How do you explain it? I have never felt ecstatically happy, in those circumstances."

"I can't tell you," she replied. "The children want me to discuss it. I don't want to discuss it. The beautiful thing about it is that it doesn't have to be discussed. All I know is, that in this fixed and blessed mood of mine I feel my life in relation with what hasn't changed and won't change; and if one can only keep one's life there, what actually becomes of one, in ordinary personal relations, doesn't matter, simply doesn't matter."

"I felt that way once," I said, "or something like that. It was when I had ended a labor of ten years, and had written the last page of my Roman Epigraphy. I didn't care for several days whether I lived or died, after that. 'All the best of me,' I said to myself, 'is there, exempted from time, safe in that book.' But I found that I couldn't get my table companions at the University Club to take that view. When it was published, not a soul of them read a word of my 'best.' They seemed still to prefer the worst of me, the mere empty shell from which the oyster had been extracted—and canned."