III
T
here
is a dream that once used to trouble me nightly but which comes back less often to me now that the years have mellowed all our sufferings.
Christmas has passed and the trees have lost a little of their gaunt blackness, but have not yet put on even the first tenderness of green by which we shall know them when Spring has matured. Yet there is the aura of Spring in the air, some almost ineffable smoothness in the breezes that slide now and do not roar across the roofs of factories and warehouses; some half-cloaked hint of warmth; a faint sweetness as of one’s youth remembered in a golden glow, impossibly happy—for whose youth was ever a happy one? But I remember in that dream something of hopefulness and promise, as of young boys laughing beside rivers with the sun falling acr
