imself heard above the clatter. Sitting there in the dark, I felt
very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black
world. The church was as cold as a tomb; some of the candles guttered
and went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of death and judgment;
I thought I heard a child's voice screaming, and could hardly believe it
was only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of forebodings; all my faith
and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I should
probably be well punished, though for what I had no precise idea. If it
had not been so dark, and if the wind had not howled so despairingly,
I should have paid little attention to the threats issuing from the
pulpit; but, as it was, I fell to making good resolutions. This is
always a bad sign,--only those who break them make them; and if you
simply do as a matter of course that which is right as it comes, any
preparatory resolving to do so becomes completely superfluous. I have
for some years past left off making them on New Year's Eve, and only the
gale happening as it did reduced me to doing so last night; for I have
long since discovered that, though the year and the resolutions may be
new, I myself am not, and it is worse than useless putting new wine into
old bottles.

"But I am not an old bottle," said Irais indignantly, when I held forth
to her to the above effect a few hours later in the library, restored
to all my philosophy by the warmth and light, "and I find my resolutions
carry me very nicely into the spring. I revise them at the end of each
month, and strike out the unnecessary ones. By the end of April they
have been so severely revised that there are none left."

"There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new
contents would gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you,
and the practice of your resolutions would lose its bitterness by
becoming a habit."

She shook her head. "Such things never lose their bitterness," she said,
"and that is why I don't let them cling to me right into the summer.
When May comes, I give myself up to jollity with all the rest of the
world, and am too busy being happy to bother about anything I may have
resolved when the days were cold and dark."

"And that is just why I love you," I thought. She often says what I
feel.

"I wonder," she went on after a pause, "whether men ever make
resolutions?"

"I don't think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries.