"It may be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act, I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of pure esthetes."