known to keep his word? Yet year after year we give eager belief
to his promises. He may have consistently broken them for fifty
years, yet this year he will keep them. This year the dream will
come true, the ship come home. This year the very dead we have
loved shall come back to us again: for Spring can even lie like
that. There is nothing he will not promise the poor hungry human
heart, with his innocent-looking daisies and those practised
liars the birds. Why, one branch of hawthorn against the sky
promises more than all the summers of time can pay, and a pond
ablaze with yellow lilies awakens such answering splendours and
enchantments in mortal bosoms,--blazons, it would seem, so august
a message from the hidden heart of the world,--that ever
afterwards, for one who has looked upon it, the most fortunate
human existence must seem a disappointment.

So I, too, with the rest of the world, was following in the wake
of the magical music. The lie it was drawing me by is perhaps
Spring's oldest, commonest lie,--the lying promise of the Perfect
Woman, the Quite Impossible She. Who has
not dreamed of her,--who that can dream at all? I suppose that
the dreams of our modern youth are entirely commercial. In the
morning of life they are rapt by intoxicating visions of some
great haberdashery business, beckoned to by the voluptuous
enticements of the legal profession, or maybe the Holy Grail they
forswear all else to seek is a snug editorial chair. These
quests and dreams were not for me. Since I was man I have had
but one dream,--namely, Woman. Alas! till this my thirtieth year
I have found only women. No! that is disloyal, disloyal to my
First Love; for this is sadly true,--that we always find the
Golden Girl in our first love, and lose her in our second.