MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
UMANE writers, from .Chaucer to Proust, have been fascinated by the mutability of human fortunes, as by the ges wrought, decade by decade, in the fabric and pattern their own minds. The more elderly and marginal I become, more attention do I pay both to the shifting careers of my quaintances and to the alterations which I notice in my own ental development. It is an interesting experience, when e has passed the age of fifty, to revisit the places or re-read books with which one was intensely familiar in childhood in youth. Last Sunday, for instance, I read again du Maurier's rilby, a novel which made a great impression upon me when was young. I imagined that I knew that novel almost by heart d that to read it after thirty and more years would merely to recapture the mood of 1908. I noticed, however, that e then I had unconsciously developed two fresh interests.
e first is a sense of period ; the second a taste for psycho- 'cal detail.
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