I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I
don't see how I could do it by letting him cripple me.
I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do;
I merely do not respect 'em. In some serious matters (relig.) I would
have them burnt.
I am old now and once was a sinner. I often think of it with a kind of
soft regret. I trust my days are numbered. I would not have that detail
overlooked.
She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young;
& I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from
decay.
He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas
that came to him--moral ideas, he called them. One fancy which he
followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of
print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her
mother with difficult questionings.--[Under Appendix w, at the end of
this volume, the reader will find one of the “Bessie” dialogues.]--He
read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked
neither logic nor humor.
Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his
finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read
parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and
how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed
to satisfy him in the end.
Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable
to bring to any conclusion. Both of these have been mentioned in former
chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence
during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a
mysterious visitant from another realm. He had experimented with each of
these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and
dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow
fallen short of his conception. “The Mysterious Stranger” in one of its
forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that
he could probably end it without much labor. He discussed something of
his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion. But I suppose
he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though
he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had
read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him
to complete it.