It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings.  The impression conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years.  These I judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother could claim.  I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual, literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost raw-and-twenty credulous.  In a lawyer’s letter of formal conciseness, devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with the situation.  So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as “your dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets.”  That, after I had merely determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient servant!

But I had convinced her.  She admitted as much in words almost joyous, so that Miss Caroline went to be with her—­to fetch her when she should be strong enough for the adventure of travel.

There were three weeks of my neighbor’s absence—­three weeks in which Clem “cleaned house”, polished the battered silver, “neated” the rooms, and tried to arrange the remaining furniture so that it would look 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.