"But I am not an old bottle," said Irais indignantly, when I held
forth to her to the above effect a few hours later in the library,
restored to all my philosophy by the warmth and light, "and I find
my resolutions carry me very nicely into the spring. I revise them
at the end of each month, and strike out the unnecessary ones.
By the end of April they have been so severely revised that there
are none left."
"There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new
contents would gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you,
and the practice of your resolutions would lose its bitterness
by becoming a habit."
She shook her head. "Such things never lose their bitterness," she said,
"and that is why I don't let them cling to me right into the summer.
When May comes, I give myself up to jollity with all the rest of the world,
and am too busy being happy to bother about anything I may have resolved
when the days were cold and dark."
"And that is just why I love you," I thought.
She often says what I feel.
"I wonder," she went on after a pause, "whether men
ever make resolutions?"
"I don't think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries.
It is a nice sort of feeling, when you have nothing else to do,
giving way to endless grief and penitence, and steeping yourself to the eyes
in contrition; but it is silly.
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