reme
luxury never came. His mince pie had, as it were, been snatched from
him. One of my friends wrote me once: "It seems to me I am always
distractingly busy just getting ready to live, but I never really
begin." Most of us are in the same plight. We are like the thrifty
housewife who kept pushing the week's work earlier and earlier, until it
backed up into the week before; yet with all her planning she never
succeeded in clearing one little spot of leisure for herself. She never
got her dessert at all. Probably she would not have enjoyed it if she
had had it. For the capacity to enjoy desserts in life is something not
to be trifled with. Children have it, and grown people can keep it if
they try, but they don't always try. I knew of a man who worked every
minute until he was sixty, getting rich. He did get rich. Then he
retired; he built him a "stately pleasure palace" and set about taking
his pleasure. And lo! he found that he had forgotten how! He tried this
and that, indoor and outdoor pleasures, the social and the solitary,
the artistic and the semi-scientific--all to no purpose. Here were all
the desserts that throughout his life he had been steadfastly pushing
aside; they were ranged before him to partake of, and when he would
partake he could not. And so he left his pleasure palace and went back
to "business."

We are not all so far gone as this, but few of us have the courage to
take our desserts when they are offered, or the free spirit to enjoy
them to the uttermost. I get up on a glorious summer morning and gaze
out at the new day. With all the strongest and deepest instincts of my
nature I long to go out into the green beauty of the world, to fling
myself down in some sloping meadow and feel the sunshine envelop me and
the warm winds pass over me, to see them tossing the grasses and tugging
at the trees and driving the white clouds across the blue, and to feel
the great earth revolving under me--for if you lie long enough you can
really get the sense of sailing through space. All this I long for--from
my window. Then I turn back to my unglorified little house--little,
however big, compared with the limitless world of beauty outside--and
betake myself to my day's routine occupations. I read my mail, I answer
letters, I go over accounts, I fly to the telephone and give orders and
make engagements. And at length, after hours of such stultifying
employment, I elect to call myself "free," and go forth to enjoy