EPILOGUE

THE WINDOW OF THE TOWER . . . . . . . 375





IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET

PROLOGUE

THE MAN WHO WROTE IN THE TOWER


I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk
and writing.

He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through
the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote
horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the
sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of
this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality,
in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were
in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore
suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the
Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant
mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good
Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light.