sat under the lamp and read, when we walked and
walked along moonlit roads or lay on the slopes of moon-washed meadows. It
was on such an evening that we faced the vagaries of farm life and
searched for a philosophy to cover them.

"I'm beginning to see that it will never be any better," I said.

"Probably not," said Jonathan, talking around his pipe.

"You seem contented enough about it."

"I am."

"I don't know that I'm contented, but perhaps I'm resigned. I believe it's
necessary."

"Of course it's necessary."

Jonathan often has the air of having known since infancy the great truths
about life that I have just discovered. I overlooked this, and went on,
"You see, we're right down close to the earth that is the ultimate basis
of everything, and all the caprices of things touch us immediately and we
have to make immediate adjustments to them."

"And that knocks the bottom out of our evenings."

"Now if we're in the city, playing bridge, somebody else is making those
adjustments for us. We're like the princess with seventeen mattresses
between her and the pea."

"She felt it, though," said Jonathan. "It kept her awake."

"I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained
that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadn't been
there."

"True," said Jonathan.

"Farm life is the pea without the mattresses--" I went on.

"Sounds a little cheerless," said Jonathan.

"Well--of course, it isn't really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy.
It's full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment."

"That was the way the princess felt about her pea."

"The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life
was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldn't call her soul her own
a minute, I suppose."

"Perhaps that was why she ran away," suggested Jonathan.

"Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didn't find
it."

"No. She found the pea--even with all those mattresses."

"And we've run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses," said
Jonathan.

"Let's not get confused--"

"I'm not confused," said Jonathan.

"Well, I shall be in a minute if I don't look out. You can't follow a
parallel too far. What I mean is, that if you run away from one kind of
complexity you run into another kind."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to like it all," I answered, "and make believe I meant to do
it."

Af