It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.