adjust his monocle and regard me through it speculatively or sadly or politely-wearily. I should be outwardly calm but I might feel an inward panic: lest he go away again without having told me a fact.
I might say to God: 'God, if you please, this small blue vase on my window-sill—I see it and I touch it and I love it—will you tell me, you who know, is there a blue vase there or is there no vase?'
And God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved fingers and might merely say: 'Madame, you have eyes with which to see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend it charm for you, no doubt. Then why not let them inform you as to its actuality?'
And then I might say, with a weariness equal to God's: 'My senses are pleasant—they are sweet—but they do not inform me, or they inform me wrong. Because they don't plainly tell me whether it's a Blue Vase of a Blue Shadow—just for that I burn in little disconcerting hell-fires, and vulture-thoughts with beaks and talons come and tear me in the night, and I starve and decay trivially, and my life is a flattish ruin and a tasteless darkness and a slight shallow death, a death in the sunshine—I am fed-up with a sense of death because of pricking
