CHAPTER XVI

Another day, going evening foremost this time. Leaning above her baby in the carriage was Nettie Vogelman, grown heavier since we knew her in the sixth grade twenty-five years before and balancing great masses of prehistoric knowledge on her head in the shape of a purple ostrichplume hat.

But where is romance in all this--with the great-coat she was wearing hanging from the bulge of her paps to the sidewalk? Romance! When knighthood was in flower. Rome. Eliogabalus in a skirt married his man servant.

We struggle to comprehend an obscure evolution--opposed by the true and static church--when the compensatory involution so plainly marked escapes our notice. Living we fail to live but insist on impaling ourselves on fossil horns. But the church balanced like a glass ball where the jets of evolution and involution meet has always, in its prosperous periods, patronised the arts. What else could it do? Religion is the shell of beauty.

The fad of evolution is swept aside. It was only mildly interesting at the best. I'll give you a dollar my son for each of these books you read: Descent of Man and Origin of Species, reprinted by Dombie and Sons, Noodle Lane, Ken. W. London; England 1890.

Who will write the natural history of involution beginning with the stone razor age in Cornwall to the stone razor age in Papua? Oh China, China teach us! Ottoman, Magyar, Moor, teach us. Norse Eric the Discoverer teach us. Cœur de Lion, teach us. Great Catherine teach us. Phryne, Thaïs, Cleopatra, Brunehilde, Lucretia Borgia teach us. What was it, Demosthenes, that she said to you? Come again?

Borne on the foamy crest of involution, like Venus on her wave, stript as she but of all consequence--since it is the return: See they return! From savages in quest of a bear we are come upon rifles, cannon. From Chaldeans solving the stars we have fallen into the bellies of the telescopes. From great runners we have evolved into speeches sent over a wire.

But our spirits, our spirits have prospered! Boom, boom. Oh yes, our spirits have grown--

The corrosive of pity, Baroja says, giving up medicine to be a baker.

Marriage is of the church because it is the intersection of _loci_ by which alone there is place for a church to stand. Beauty is an arrow. Diana launched her shaft into the air and where the deer and the arrow met a church was founded and there beauty had died.

So youth and youth meet and die and there the church sets up its ceremony.

Who will write the natural history of involution?

I have forgotten something important that I wanted to say. Thus having forgotten and remembered that it was important the folly of all thought is revealed.

The deer lay panting on the leaves while Diana leaned over it to stab it in the neck with her dagger.

I have forgotten what I wanted to say.

Venus and Adonis.

The second time I saw her it was in a room of a hotel in the city.