When we're at home, he handles my bossiness with remarkable compliance. I tell him what he should do, and he does it, unless he doesn't want to. In Provence, however, he finds me overbearing, no doubt due to an excess of togetherness. He experiences me as conducting a nonstop game of “Mother May I,” demanding his obedience to the childish equivalent of giant steps, baby steps, backward steps, and umbrella steps. (Umbrella steps, as you may recall, involve twirling.)
In deference to Christian usage we can say that the transcendentals constitute the Logos within which everything has its being and according to which everything is made.
Madam, the good Yankee housewife, who has reminiscences of having sold her husband's second best unwhisperables one day in the earlier period of her wedded life, to a young Israelite with a big basket, rich with gaudy mantel ornaments, who rode down contemptuously, and annihilated before her very face, the testimony of her very eyes, and made her think the unwhisperables aforesaid a bundle of worthlessness, all tattered and torn —mandam, I say, who remembers this, and the paltry gilt vase she got (and which the first baby luckily knoced over and broke with its excursive little fist one day), will hardly read with much sympathy these romantic rhapsodies concerning the children of Israel.
The lecture was achromatic, the speaker used politics to suppress the weight of his/her subject.
