It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
Arthur Machen
For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced.
If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.
Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.
It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.
Now, everybody, I suppose, is aware that in recent years the silly business of divination by dreams has ceased to be a joke and has become a very serious science.
Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
