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 “heimweh” that haunts the hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic resolutions.  And, since the game had taught me that yielding—­where opposition is fated to avail not—­is graceful in proportion to its readiness, I surrendered as quietly as might be.

One woman face had been wholly mine for hidden cherishing through all the years.  A woman face, be it understood, not the face of a woman.  At first it had been that; but with the years it had lost the lines that made it but that one.  Imperceptibly, it had taken on an alien, vague softness that but increased its charm while diminishing its power to hurt.

It brought me now only a pensive pleasure and no feeling more acute.  It was my ashes of roses, the music of my first love, its poignancies softened by time and memory into an ineffable, faint melody; it was the moon that drenched my bygone youth with wonder-light—­a dream-face, exquisite as running water, unfolding flowers and those other sweets that poets try in vain to entangle in the meshes of word and rhythm.

This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden of familiar surprises.  All of which meant that I was a poor thing of clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that somewhere between him and God was the one woman, breathing and conscious, perhaps even longing.  More plainly, it meant that I was a man whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair.  Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt “the wrinkled spoils of age”, my voice would waver ominously, and I should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing childish games of belief with some foolish dog.  I would be a village “character” of the sort that is justly said to “dodder.”  And the judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past unromantically barren.