The incident is worth careful attention. For life, I believe, is continually treating us as that benevolent but misguided hostess treated the incomprehensible Henry. If we postpone our mince pie, it is often snatched from us and we never get it at all. I knew a youth once who habitually rode a bicycle that was too small for him. He explained that he continued to do this because then, when at some future time he did have one that fitted him, he would be so surpassingly comfortable! Soon after, bicycles went out of fashion, and I fear the moment of supreme luxury never came. His mince pie had, as it were, been snatched from him. One of my friends wrote me once: "It seems to me I am always distractingly busy just getting ready to live, but I never really begin." Most of us are in the same plight. We are like the thrifty housewife who kept pushing the week's work earlier and earlier, until it backed up into the week before; yet with all her planning she never succeeded in clearing one little spot of leisure for herself. She never got her dessert at all. Probably she would not have enjoyed it if she had had it. For the capacity to enjoy desserts in life is something not to be trifled with. Children have it, and grown people can keep it if they try, but they don't always try. I knew of a man who worked every minute until he was sixty, getting rich. He did get rich. Then he retired; he built him a "stately pleasure palace" and set about taking his pleasure. And lo! he found that he had forgotten how! He tried this and that, indoor and outdoor pleasures, the social and the solitary, the artistic and the semi-scientific--all to no purpose. Here were all the desserts that throughout his life he had been steadfastly pushing aside; they were ranged before him to partake of, and when he would partake he could not. And so he left his pleasure palace and went back to "business."