who either from choice or necessity have
knocked about the world for any length of time are more or less
fatalists. Jimmy was an optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on
Fate, not as a blind dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but
rather as a benevolent being with a pleasing bias in his own favor.
He had almost a Napoleonic faith in his star. At various periods of
his life (notably at the time when, as he had told Lord Dreever, he
had breakfasted on bird-seed), he had been in uncommonly tight
corners, but his luck had always extricated him. It struck him that
it would be an unthinkable piece of bad sportsmanship on Fate's part
to see him through so much, and then to abandon him just as he had
arrived in sight of what was by far the biggest thing of his life.
Of course, his view of what constituted the biggest thing in life
had changed with the years. Every ridge of the Hill of Supreme
Moments in turn had been mistaken by him for the summit; but this
last, he felt instinctively, was genuine. For good or bad, Molly was
woven into the texture of his life. In the stormy period of the
early twenties, he had thought the same of other girls, who were now
mere memories as dim as those of figures in a half-forgotten play.
In their case, his convalescence had been temporarily painful, but
brief. Force of will and an active life had worked the cure. He had
merely braced himself, and firmly ejected them from his mind. A week
or two of aching emptiness, and his heart had been once more in
readiness, all nicely swept and garnished, for the next lodger.

But, in the case of Molly, it was different. He had passed the age
of instantaneous susceptibility. Like a landlord who has been
cheated by previous tenants, he had become wary. He mistrusted his
powers of recuperation in case of disaster. The will in these
matters, just like the mundane "bouncer," gets past its work. For
some years now, Jimmy had had a feeling that the next arrival would
come to stay; and he had adopted in consequence a gently defensive
attitude toward the other sex. Molly had broken through this, and he
saw that his estimate of his will-power had been just. Methods that
had proved excellent in the past were useless now. There was no
trace here of the dimly consoling feeling of earlier years, that
there were other girls in the world. He did not try to deceive
himself. He knew that he had passed the age when a man can fall in
love with any one of a number