I had possessed her - and she never knew it. - Vladimir Nabokov

for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate's offering, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy - but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes - simply, instantaneously and decisevely destroying any hope in it - then you are suddenly amazed to find that although you did not believe in it, you had been living with it all this time, not realizingt he constant, close presence of the dream, which had long since grown fat and independent, so that now you cannot get it out of your life without making a hole in that life.

One opal cloudlet in an oval form reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm which in a distant valley has been staged for we are most artistically caged.