horically speaking, leaves the front gate open or goes
therein and turns on a gramophone. We come into this world alone, and we
leave it by ourselves; and the older we grow the more we realise that, in
spite of our own heart's longing to share, we are most really at peace
when we are quite alone in our own company. When we are young we hope
and expect our "dreams" to become one day a glorious reality. When we
are older we realise that our "dreams" will always remain "dreams", and,
strange as it may sound, they become more real to us, even as "dreams,"
than do any realities--except bores and toothache. For the "dreams" of
youth become the "let's pretend" of age. And the person who has
forgotten the game of "let's pretend" is in soul-colour of the dulness of
ditch-water. And "let's pretend" is a game which we can best play by
ourselves. Even the proximity of a living being, content to do and say
nothing, robs it of its keenest enjoyment. No, we must be by ourselves
for the world around us to seem really inhabited by people we love the
most amid surroundings nearest our ideal. There are no bores in our
dream-world. Nothing disagreeable happens there. And, thank Heaven, we
can enter it almost anywhere--sometimes if we merely close our eyes! And
we can be our real selves in this dream-world of ours too, there is
nobody to say us nay; there are no laws and no false morals; we are fairy
kings and queens in a fairy kingdom. I always pity the man or woman who
is no monarch in this very real kingdom of shadows which lies all around
us, and which we can enter to reign therein whenever the human "jar" is
safely out of the way. There we can be our true selves and live our true
life, in what seems a very real world--a world, moreover, which we hope
one day will be the reality of Heaven.

_My Escape and Some Others_

Everybody, as I said before, has his or her own receipt for "getting
away." Some find it in long "chats" over the fireside with old friends;
some in reading and music and art; some in travel, some in "good works"
and just a few in "bad" ones. A new hat will often lift a woman several
floors nearer to the seventh heaven. A good dinner in prospect will
sometimes elevate the spirit of man out of the dreary "rut" and give that
_soupcon_ of something-to-live-for which can take the ordinary everyday
and turn it into a day which belongs to the _extraordinary_. For myself,
I like to get out into the countr