We are not all so far gone as this, but few of us have the courage to take our desserts when they are offered, or the free spirit to enjoy them to the uttermost. I get up on a glorious summer morning and gaze out at the new day. With all the strongest and deepest instincts of my nature I long to go out into the green beauty of the world, to fling myself down in some sloping meadow and feel the sunshine envelop me and the warm winds pass over me, to see them tossing the grasses and tugging at the trees and driving the white clouds across the blue, and to feel the great earth revolving under me--for if you lie long enough you can really get the sense of sailing through space. All this I long for--from my window. Then I turn back to my unglorified little house--little, however big, compared with the limitless world of beauty outside--and betake myself to my day's routine occupations. I read my mail, I answer letters, I go over accounts, I fly to the telephone and give orders and make engagements. And at length, after hours of such stultifying employment, I elect to call myself "free," and go forth to enjoy my "well-earned" leisure. Fool that I am! As if enjoyment were a thing to be taken up and laid down at will, like a walking-stick. As if one could let the golden moment pass and hope to find it again awaiting our convenience. Why can we not be like Pippa with her one precious day? But if she had been born in New England do you suppose her day would have been what it was? Would she have sprung up at daybreak with heart and mind all alight for pleasure? Certainly not. She would have spent the golden morning in cleaning the kitchen, and the golden afternoon in clearing up the attic, and would have gone out for a little walk after the supper dishes were washed, only because she thought she "ought" to take a little exercise in the open air. Duty and work are all very well, but we have bound ourselves up in them so completely that we have almost lost the art of spontaneous enjoyment. We can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, annoyed or gratified, but we cannot feel simple, buoyant, instinctive enjoyment in anything. We take our very pleasures under the name of duties-- "We ought to take a walk," "We ought not to miss that concert," "We ought to read" a certain book, "We ought" to go and see this friend, or invite that one to see us. Those things that should be our spontaneous pleasures we have clothed and masked until they no longer know themselves. A pleasure must present itself under the guise of a duty before we feel that we can wholly give ourselves over to it. Ah, let us stop all that! Let us take our pleasures without apology. Let us give up this fashion of shoving them away into the left-over corners of our lives, covering their gleaming raiment with sad-colored robes, and visiting them with half-averted faces. Let us consort with them openly, gayly! The Jonathan Papers I A Placid Runaway