Come Dance With Me - A Memoir 1898-1956; Illustrated #222806

I am going to miss my companion of the last fifteen months' shared adventures, for a manuscript, I have discovered, is the ideal friend — silent and accommodating. It remains unresentful when mislaid, or when it is overworked by an attack of zeal and spare time on the part of the writer. It will stay submissive when erased, corrected and blue — pencilled to pieces. It exudes passive friendliness when you discard it after midnight, with a glow of content concerning your thoughts just expressed on its white surface. It turns the other cheek next morning, when, on re — reading your literary carryings — ou of the night before, you are aghast: you forthwith erase rudely and scratch hysterically at the surface of your patient friend — and who knows if its passivity might not reflect the fact that it could have told you all this last night? The manuscript is, above all, your kindest editor — for it does not condemn or argue: silently it shows you the insufferable depths of your grammatical errors — crashing clichés and befogged thinking. I am going to miss exercising my mind with the vivid business of remembering things forgotten — delving backwards into time towards some incident glowing clearly, in a lost world that has made the correct year, day and date of the picture under survey of secondary importance. Such research spells tedium, and, as always, the amateur loses patience over matters that are concerned with dry precise reckoning.