Robert Gathorne- Hardy, Three acres and a mill, Londres, MacMillan, 1939, p. 3-4.

Our inner selves, or, if in these ironical times I may use the word, our souls, are embryos, always growing, but never ripe for birth; or not embryos so much as grubs that never attain perfection.And we need for them, like the tender caddis-worm, a protection cemented together from the rubbish of memory. But I have read somewhere that a caddis has been known to make its protecting tube, when nothing else was available, from coloured glass beads, giving an unfamiliar beauty to its commonly dull dwelling-place. My own little private tube, I confessed to myself, might lack the elegance of so pretty and fantastic a structure of coloured glass; but it was pretty enough, for all that. It was my own tube, and I liked it. And then, in the air of these cogitations, an undefined melancholy explained itself (I am not thinking of the general fears and sorrows which we all of us experienced then — foreboding as to one’s own fate, and horror at the world’s direction).