for a time we say no more, and i fall musing about my strange encounter with my utopian double. i think of the confessions i have just made to him, the strange admissions both to him and myself. i have stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, the pride that has slumbered, the hopes and disappointments that have not troubled me for years. there are things that happened to me in my adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the first humiliations i was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth. the dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy — i have ostensibly forgiven, i have for the most part forgotten — and yet when i recall them i hate each actor still. whenever it comes into my mind — i do my best to prevent it — there it is, and these detestable people blot out the stars for me.

i have told all that story to my double, and he has listened with understanding eyes. but for a little while those squalid memories will not sink back into the deeps.

we lean, side by side, over our balcony, lost in such egotistical absorptions, quite heedless of the great palace of noble dreams to which our first enterprise has brought us.