His voice kept explaining things. There was a passion for explanation in him.

As he sat in the hotel he had written certain words on paper and putting the paper into an envelope had sent it away to a woman living in a distant place. Then he walked and walked and thought of more words and going back to the hotel wrote them out on other pieces of paper.

A thing was created within him it was hard to explain, that he had not understood himself. One walked under the stars and in quiet streets of towns under trees and sometimes, on summer evenings, heard voices in the darkness. People, men and women, were sitting in the darkness on the porches of houses. There was an illusion created. One sensed in the darkness somewhere a deep quiet splendour of life and ran towards it. There was a kind of desperate eagerness. In the sky the stars shone more splendidly because of one's thoughts. There was a little wind and it was like the hand of a lover touching the cheeks, playing in one's hair. There was something lovely in life one must find. When one was young one could not stand still, but must go towards it. The writing of the letters was an effort to go towards the thing. It was an effort to find footing in the darkness on strange winding roads.

And so John Webster had, by his letter-writing, done a strange and false thing to himself and to the woman who was later to be his wife. He had created a world of unrealities. Would he and the woman be able to live together in that world?

Meditations in Time of Civil War

By William Butler Yeats

ANCESTRAL HOUSES

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,

Amid the rustle of his planted hills,

Life overflows without ambitious pains

And rains down life until the basin spills,

And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains,

As though to choose whatever shape it wills,

And never stoop to a mechanical,

Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung

But that he found more substance there than dreams,

That out of life's own self delight had sprung

The abounding glittering jet though now it seems

As if some marvellous empty sea-shell, flung

Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,

And not a fountain where the symbol which

Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man

Called architect and artist in that they,

Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone

The sweetness that all longed for night and day,

The gentleness none there had ever known;

But when the master's buried mice can play

And maybe the great-grandson of that house

For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.

Oh, what if gardens where the peacock strays

With delicate feet upon old terraces,

Or else all Juno from an urn displays