_Hesperia_ is the first story in the time sequence, that is, as I have already said, it endeavours to describe the experience that took place in Egypt at the historic opening of the Tomb, February 1923. The first rough notes were dated 1924, though as they were "left over" from _Secret Name_ in _Palimpsest_, published as I have noted in 1926 in Paris, they must have been written soon after my return to Switzerland, spring 1923. But again, _Hesperia_ was not finally shaped until last winter, that is, it was only last winter that it "came true."

_Hesperia_ then, is the first and the last of the stories. But how arrange them? There is _The Moment_ that I had first intended to use as the title for this collection, its theme and opening. But perhaps it is almost impossible for me to assess _The Moment_, as the Elaine of the story, my "oldest" friend, though we had met rarely or late years, was with her mother and daughter, killed in an air-raid early in the war.

Jan.22

But I have re-read _The Moment_ and it must serve as title for this collection of stories. As I say, they are not condensed into one period, as are the war-sketches, and dreams of _Within the Walls_. These stories seem hardly to related to one another and I must jump from one psychological dilemma to another, across the years. There is no jump and only one dilemma in _Within the Walls_. It is the actuality or the imminent possibility of death from the high explosives.

What death came to the Elaine of _The Moment_.

I mention her briefly in the Freud _Writing_, in connection with a seal-ring I identified in the Louvre, when I first visited it with Frances and her mother, summer 1911. I had a dream of this thistle and seppent motive in America, soon before planning my first trip "abroad."

In the dream, the design is carved on a rough block of stone, called it an altar. I could find no replica of this design and I never saw it anywhere but in the Louvre. "Under the glass, set in a row with other seal-rings, was a little

the 3 great-agate oval." On the agate is carved a serpent and the "exquisitely chased stalk, with the spiney double-leaf and the flower-head, our thistle."

Now I find *The Moment* "exquisitely chased" and I dedicate it to that design.

In that sense, all the stories are so dedicated. They have this in common. Though they range in time of writing, from 1926 to 1945, or if we count the first and final versions of *desperia*, from 1928 to 1948, they are individually separate, dedicatory chapels or Chapters, as I use the word in speaking of *The Sword*. They are Chapter Houses, adjoining some vast Cathedral.

Yes, they are that. The Cathedral is the Dream, the Synthesis of a Dream. I have already used this simile in the Advent of the Freud Writing. The Dream is there in the Writing only but it is not centralized or stabilized with the conclusion of *The Sword Went Out to Sea*. The Sword is reality or truth, and established in that Synthesis of a Dream. The Sword Went Out to Sea. Having found the answer, I can afford to go back, even to those years of apparently sterile waiting. For the years were not really sterile and the answer when it came, surpassed in magnificence and simplicity, any dream that I had had or any dream that I might have had, during those years of waiting.

There is too, a genuine psychic-current running through these stories that serves eventually to relate them to the final dynamic center, the tripod-table of the poet William Morris. The three women of *The Moment* are caught in a circle, opposites attract and the solution or the answer when it comes, is poignant in the extreme, though related, as it were, only to those three. It is a personal answer, it has answered the demand, the heart-ache of one person with a message is given by one in person to one person. But the Moment of the final or Chapter or Chapter House of the great Cathedral itself, the message is given by many to the whole world.

Jubilee and The Last Time have this in common with The Moment. They are small, set pieces like chamber-music; the players are few. In fact, in The Moment, there is a trio, three women. Jubilee and The Last Time play with variations, the same xmrxxx duet.

Jubilee is more important. It tells of a meeting. After fifteen years, the two who had separated, one gathers, in romantic surroundings, now meet in London. The surroundings are not un-romantic, there is the same parchment lamp-shade, the same dim evening shadows as in The Moment, the same interior decorum that is lighted or translated into romance by the bibelots on the occasional-table, the cigarette-box, the seven-branched candlestick, the treasured print, brought years ago from Italy, now curled at the edges and the tumbler with the Carlo Crivelli handful of small flowers. The flowers in The Moment are starry anemones that edge a shallow bowl. The chairs have been re-arranged, the coffee-tray is a tea-tray but it is in substance, the same interior and the same story.

The three owners of The Moment resolve a problem, temporarily at least. The one woman and the one man in Jubilee, resolve it in a different way. The Moment of their first meeting, the Moment of the woman's strange aberration on a ship sailing, spring 1930, for Greece, is not, fifteen years later, this moment. Actually, the realized Greek Moment is described in the XXXVI Freud Writing, in the so far unpublished prelude or postlude that I call Advent.

But the moment in Jubilee, in 1935, in London, is not the Moment. Nor is the moment in The Last Time, a slighter story, a duet on the same theme.

There is that, at least, about these stories. They are clearing the gorund. There is something that the author must get clear. She would in The Last Time, delay a parting which to her, from the beginning, is inevitable. This story was written spring 1936; we are here, as in Jubilee, in that maligned decade. She would drift with the others, she would play with the others. " But I am not so easily allowed to let go, who lift balances (Invisible) beside me, from the table, to weight his soul."