Arthur Hughes Phyllis

Arthur Hughes PhyllisA Harvest FestivalA coign of vantage
browsing, thanks." At the same time a dim memory of our readings in the hemlock must have stirred in her, for she took it upon herself to feed me more of the Scroll. Though I'd had no lunch to speak of and was quite famished, the old vellum was bitter on my tongue, like dung dried in the sun of desert centuries -- quite apart from the anguish I flavored it with, compounded of doubt and desolation. For either my insight of a few moments earlier was false, in which case I was as much in the dark as ever, or else it was true, in which case I was failing by my own terms. What was the use of restoring those shreds to the Scroll-case? I was not blind to the possibility that failing all, on my own terms as well as WESCAC's, might be the deeper sense of my answer; that is to say, that the failure truly equal to passage might be the failure to understand truly that Failure is Passage. Even as I chewed, that proposition flickered through my head as on a dim translux but did not console me. No, I was as snarled and wrecked as the Founder's Scroll: never mind P.-G. Hector's crook (now belaboring my shoulders) and the alarums of bystanders; never mind that the lights began to flicker again, as they had upon my spring-term disaster, bespeaking another crisis at