that you are bound to recollect, sooner or later, anything that you may have forgotten: an argument that only requires to be stated to display its fallacy; secondly, on a vague belief that a defection of so flagrant a character must inevitably be brought home to you by an incensed host or hostess—a theory that makes no allowance for the blissful sense of injury and offended pride, the joy of brooding over a wrong, which is one of the chief pleasures left to humanity. No: one doesn't know, and one can't know: and the past career of the most self-satisfied of us is doubtless littered with the debris of forgotten invitations.
Of course invitations, being but a small part of life, and not—as some would imply by their practice—its chief end, must be taken to stand here for much besides. One has only to think of the appalling amount of book-lore one has "crammed" in days gone by, and of the pitiful fragments that survive, to realise that facts, deeds, achievements, experiences numberless, may just as well have been hurried along the dusty track to oblivion. And once it has been fairly brought home to us that we have entirely forgotten any one thing—why, the gate is open. It is clear we may just as easily have forgotten hundreds.
This lamentable position of things was specially forced upon me, some time ago, by a certain persistent dream that used to wing its way to my bedside, not once or twice, but coming a dozen times, and always (I felt sure at the time) from out the Ivory Portal. First, there would be a sense of snugness, of cushioned comfort, of home-coming. Next, a gradual awakening to consciousness in a certain little room, very dear and familiar, sequestered in some corner of the more populous and roaring part of London: solitary, the world walled out, but full of a brooding sense of peace and of possession. At times I would make my way there, unerringly, through the wet and windy streets, climb the
