THE PATH OF VISION
Trappist system. For a week or ten days at a time, I would go into silence, and all apparently would go well, not with me, however, but with my household. The repression accentuated my trouble, aggravated my disease. The asylum stared me in the face. But I saved myself, as you see. Indeed, only when I left my dear good people and put up again in the cold, hard solitude of the crowd in the city, where toleration is neither a principle nor an article of faith, but simply a matter of necessity, was I cured of my querulous, petulent, acerbic, atrabilious, misanthropic abominations. And cured too of my egotism and all the illusions and all the vanities it engenders. The City hath its healing balm, my friend."
And he raised his glass.
"To the Mother of Common Sense—the rest of her children don't count for much—to the great City."
[82]
