is usually mocked
as mere optimism, but I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism,
or is at least as well founded; and since the one can no more establish
itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have optimism.
That was always the philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why
that should be changed. The conditions are not changed."

There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair nor the unreal editor
broke for a while. Then the Chair suggested, "I suppose that there is
not much change in Christmas, at any rate?"

"No," said the unreal editor; "it goes on pretty much as it used. The
Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to
dull people who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent on
heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the
simple 'pleasure of the time' with the activities of their fatuous
vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to the
Timminses?"

"I don't see why not," said the Easy Chair. "They are not the architects
of their own personalities."

"Ah, take care, take care!" cried the unreal editor. "You will be saying
next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the Timminses
would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic and
pernicious; and you know what _that_ comes to!"

"No, I am in no danger of that," the Easy Chair retorted. "The Timminses
are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately
moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will.
Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful."

"And just now you were making excuses for them!"

"I said they were not the architects of their own personalities; but,
nevertheless, they are masters of themselves. They are really free to
leave off giving little dinners any day they think so. It should be the
moralist's business to teach them to think so."

"And that was what Curtis gladly made his business," the unreal editor
somewhat sadly confessed, with an unspoken regret for his own
difference. More than once it had seemed to him in considering that
rare nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly in loving the
right rather than in hating the wrong; in fact, in not hating at all,
but in pitying and accounting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted
into an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor in that
beautiful tribute to the high s