k like
a great deal of furniture indeed; three weeks in which Little Arcady
again decked itself with June garlands and seemed not, at first glance,
to belie its rather pretentious name; three weeks when I studied a
calendar which impassively averred that I was thirty-five, a mirror
which added weight to that testimony, and the game which taught me with
some freshness at each failure that the greater game it symbolizes is
not meant to be won--only to be played forever with as eager a zest, as
daring a hope, as if victory were sure.

The season at hand found me in sore need of this teaching. It was then
that errant impulse counselled rebellion against the decrees of calendar
and looking-glass. If vatted wine in dark cellars turns in its bed and
mutters seethingly at this time, in a mysterious, intuitive sympathy
with the blossoming grape, a man free and above ground, with eyes to
behold that miracle, may hardly hope to escape an answering thrill to
its call.

Wherefore I played the game diligently, torn by the need of its higher
lessons. And at last I was well instructed by it, as all may be who
approach it thus, above a trivial lust for winning.

Two of us played in that provocative June. One was myself, alert for
auspicious falls of the cards, yet stoical and undepressed when a deal
promising to be almost too easy for interest was suddenly blocked by
some trifling card. Thus was I schooled to expectations of a wise
shallowness, not so deep but that they might be overrun by the moderate
flow of human happiness. Thus one learned to expect little under much
wanting, and to find his most certain profit in observing the freshness
of those devices which left him frustrated. Jim, the other player of us,
chased gluttonous robins on the lawn, ever with an indifferent success,
but with as undimmed a faith, as fatuous a certainty, as the earliest of
gods could have wished to see. And between us we achieved a conviction
that the greater game is worth playing, even when one has discovered its
terrific percentage of failures.

I was not unpleased to be alone during this period of discipline when my
soul was perforce purged of its troublesome ferments. It was well that
my neighbor should have gone where she might distract me never so
little.

For it was at the season when Nature brews the irresistible philter.
Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was
overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "he