He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
mother and the bishop at Tuebingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or
a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
drowsily out at the glorified blackness--as if black were no longer
absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
inclusive than white.
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