The title refers to remarks linked to this afternoon :
"An ingenious story line serves to convey
the mysteriousness of destiny, the 'grim pen'
of fate that encloses Hazel Shade."
— John Burt Foster Jr. on page 224 of
Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism
(Princeton University Press, 1993)
Vide a relevant page on Wallace Stevens.