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they were already hopefully there, the times I came. There they lie, trinkets neither useful nor germane, yet if I could, as I pass by now, I would take one—Miss Pridden’s X.
    But I went by them without seeing, on into the library, like any of the infrequent sightseers, or the official archivists who came perhaps once a year, and if Miss Pridden had been in the kitchen she would have taken this quite as custom, preserved as she was in the stiff, museum shadow of her aunt, surviving her like the browned curator rose still to be found between the heavy pages of some volume whose owner once, for irony, pressed it there. The aunt had been a spinster scholar, one of those composite bluestocking women of nineteenth-century America, whose tripartite names ring a vague and maudlin bell, of whom one is never sure whether it was temperance they espoused or Chautauqua, bloomers or transcendentalism, homeopathy or the vote. More a transplanted citizen of Boston and New York, she had bequeathed to Tuscana only the pride of her birth and death there—and the house with the books. Not long ago I came across an old account of her—working, as I do, for an encyclopedia has, in addition to its main satisfaction for me, these minor pleasures. And when I did so, the whole flavor of those shelves came back to me—the truncated English Ovid next to the feminist homiletic, the candied-violet Affection’s Gift hard by the pamphlet on Andersonville prison, all the balked ambience of those women whom society, seeking to destroy, first makes imperfectly male. Poor androgynous shelves, their contents bequeathed me little, but the room itself bound me forever in the opiate habit of books.
    It was a perfect library. One entered by the only access—a low door under the stairs—a small, white, oval room about a story and a half high. Outside the house one saw that the flat railed roof of this room formed one of those mincing battlements known as a “widow’s walk,” but the inside was grave and austere, furnished only with a spindle chair and a long table whose dark leather top was ink-stained and chipped here and there to a spongy russet. The light, raying down from three clerestory openings in the wall, was poor, making the print more precious. In retrospect, I see that the room resembled a bookplate of a scholar’s study, lacking only the woodcut iconographer himself bent above the inkwell with the flowing plume, but I was too ill-learned then to carp because Manfred could not have strode that battlement, or to miss, among the books, the Greek strophes that should have been there. Once inside that room, it enclosed me like an egg perfectly blown free of all but air, the shining nacre of the shelves, and myself a stray blood-fleck of life left to nourish as I could.
    The nourishment, as I have said, was secondary, although this was not the fault of the trivialities to be found there. For, after half a lifetime spent with books, some of them of the purest diadem, events have made me see that books were always to remain secondary with me. I have never much respected them for the flat facts to be pecked from them, or even for those austral flights of the imagination whose unique province they claim to be. “Facts” are no more than a pox that changes its nature from man to man, from age to age, that saves in one generation and kills in another. And imagination, which speaks in dithyramb, can never equal the rough, fell syllable of memory. No, I already went to the books then, as I did later—and as I would now, had I not a better resource—again for the frame of secret feeling in which they enclosed me.
    A book too needs its confidant, as much as any man, but cannot choose its terms. In the long, suspended afternoons of childhood, that latitude which disappears with the coming of the time sense, to be counterfeited later only briefly by the first entente of love, I sat in that room for hours, turning over this or that yellowed minor page,