Chaos all around him, his clothes always torn, his books soiled, his papers lost. His personal belongings, of which he remembered an object now and then which he missed, wanted to show Djuna, were scattered all over the world, in rooming-house cellars where they were kept as hostages for unpaid rent.

All the little flames burning in him at once, except the wise one of the holy ghost.

It saddened Djuna that Rango was so eager to go to war, to fight for his ideas, to die for them. It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science. Her feminine self was sad and smiled, too, at this game of endowing personal and emotional beliefs with the dignity of impersonal names. She smiled at this as men smile at women's enlargement of personal tragedies to a status men do not believe applicable to personal lives.

While Rango took the side of wars and revolutions, she took the side of Rango, she took the side of love.

Parties changed every day, philosophies and science changed, but for Djuna human love alone continued. Great changes in the maps of the world, but none in this need of human love, this tragedy of human love swinging between illusion and human life, sometimes breaking at the dangerous passageway between illusion and human life, sometimes breaking altogether. But love itself as continuous as life.

She smiled at man's great need to build cities when it was so much harder to build relationships, his need to conquer countries when it was so much harder to conquer one heart, to satisfy a child, to create a perfect human life. Man's need to invent, to circumnavigate space when it is so much harder to overcome space between human beings, man's need to organize systems of philosophy when it was so much harder to understand one human being, and when the greatest depths of human character lay but half explored.

"I must go to war," he said. "I must act. I must serve a cause."

Rango gave her the feeling of one who reproduced in life gestures and scenes and atmosphere already imprinted on her memory. Where had she already seen Rango on horseback, wearing white fur boots, furs and corduroys, Rango with his burning eyes, somber face, and wild black hair?

Where had she already seen Rango's face in passion worshipful like a man receiving communion, the profane wafer on the tongue?

Seeing him lying at her side was like one of those memories which assail one while traveling through foreign lands to which one was not bound in any conscious way, and yet at each step recognizing its familiarity, with an exact prescience of the scene awaiting one around the corner of the street.

Memory, or race memories, or the influence of tales, fairy tales, legends, and ballads heard in childhood?