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Ball, Eustace Hale

"The Voice on the Wire"

Books are so much
more worth reading when they have been read and read again.
Don't you think so?"
"Yes. I see your tastes run to the modern school. Individualism,
even morbidity: Spencer, Nietsche, Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, Kropotkin,
Gorky--They express your thoughts collectively?"
"Yes, but not radically enough. My entire intellectual life has
driven me forward--I am a disciple of the absolute freedom, the
divinity of self, and--but there I invited you to a joy party,
not a university seminar."
"But the party will grow riper with age," and Shirley was prone
to continue the autopsy. "You are a university man. Where did
you study?"
"Sipping here and there," and a forgivable vanity lightened
Warren's face. "Gottingen, Warsaw, Jena, Oxford, Milan, The
Sorbonne and even at Heidelberg, the jolly old place. You see my
scar?" He pulled back a lock of his wavy black hair from the
left temple to show a cut from a student duelist's sword. "But
you Americans--I mean, we Americans--we have such opportunities
to pick up the best things from the rest of the world.


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