to eat cake is when it is just out of the oven, that the
only way to eat ice cream is to dip it out of the freezer, down under
the apple tree, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. Afterward, when it
appears in sober decorum, surrounded by all the appurtenances of
civilization, it is a very commonplace affair; out under the apple tree
it is ambrosia.

Why not go further? Why not take all our desserts in life when they
taste best, instead of at the proper time, when we don't care for them?
Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be enjoyed. Why not have them when
most enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain perverted
conscientiousness that leads us to this enforcement of our pleasures. I
am myself conscious that I can scarcely ever approach a pleasure with a
mind singly bent on enjoyment. I regard it with something like
suspicion, I hedge, I hesitate, I defer. What is the motive force here?
Is it an inherited asceticism, bidding us beware of pleasure as such? Is
it pride, which will not permit us to make unseemly haste toward our
desires? Is it a subtle self-gratification, which seeks to add zest,
tone, to our delights by postponing them? Is it fear of anticlimax,
which makes us save our pleasure for the last thing, that there may be
no descent afterward? Certainly the last was the motive in the case of
the little boy who, dining out, was given a piece of mince and one of
custard pie. He liked the mince best, therefore he saved it until the
last, and had just conscientiously finished the custard when his beaming
hostess said: "Oh, you like the custard best! Well, dear, you needn't
eat the other. Delia, bring another plate for Henry and I'll give him
another piece of the custard pie." Pathetic! Yet I confess my sympathy
with Henry has always been qualified by disapproval of his methods,
which, it seems to me, brought down upon him an awful but not wholly
undeserved penalty.

The incident is worth careful attention. For life, I believe, is
continually treating us as that benevolent but misguided hostess treated
the incomprehensible Henry. If we postpone our mince pie, it is often
snatched from us and we never get it at all. I knew a youth once who
habitually rode a bicycle that was too small for him. He explained that
he continued to do this because then, when at some future time he did
have one that fitted him, he would be so surpassingly comfortable! Soon
after, bicycles went out of fashion, and I fear the moment of sup