imweh" 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.

There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this. But I fought
them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing.
Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of
perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his
race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species
to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as
an individual dog were suddenly revealed. In such instants he