As to most of them we did not hold speech together.  Our intimacy as yet lay quite within a circle so charmed that it might not be entered by things too personal to either of us.  By a kind of tacit treaty we brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious tone.  Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they had been hailed by my friend with an unfailing levity which the widow of J. Rodney Potts, for one, would have found it impossible to condone.  “I am a light old woman,” she had said to me; “I laugh at the world even when I fear it most.”  There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when I shrived her.  But, though we sacredly observed all mirthful conventions in our dallying, I knew that Miss Caroline had more than enough to ponder of matters weighty.  I knew that she was likely to have regretted a too-ready sharing of Clem’s easy enthusiasm over industrial conditions in the North.

Clem believed by instinct not only that the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, but that the incidental good sufficeth also.  His quality of faith would have seemed a pointed rebuke to the common run of believers in a Providence that watches and sends.  Confronted by the spectre of present want he could exorcise it neatly by the device of beholding, in a contrary vision, future limitless pullets of a marketable immaturity, or endless acres of garden produce ripe and ready to sell.  Moreover, his experience with “gold money” was as yet insufficient to acquaint him with its truly volatile character.  All sums greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him—­equally prodigious.  Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank was an institution of such abiding grace that, having once established a connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need.  I was sure indeed that Miss Caroline had defined these limitations of Clem as a financier.  It was one of those enjoyable topics which we had been free to discuss.  That she had discovered how lamentably his resources had been reduced by freight tolls on her furniture I could only infer.  But I knew, at least, that she was aware of the blistering, rainless summer that had laid Clem’s high hopes of a garden in dust and cut off half his revenue.  Plainly, Miss Caroline had more than enough of matters fit to engage her graver moments.

For my own part I, too, had matters to dwell upon of an equal gravity in their own poor way; though perhaps, too, I could not have defined them as understandingly as I did the perplexities of my neighbor.

Happily the feat need not be attempted; I had the game, in which troubles may be played away at least beyond the necessity for analyzing them—­the game which requires two decks and is to be played alone—­the most efficacious of those devices for the solitary which cards afford.