We live in cantankerous days. Anybody who has enough energy to do anything particular in the world has more or less difficulty in getting on with people. Unless he chooses to take his dolls to the attic, he is in for occasional criticisms, laughter, interruptions, and the experience of being called by names that are not his own. The world sends flowers to the dying, but not to people when they get their strength. It is the very rare person, indeed, who goes through life with nothing to ruffle him at all.
In moments of irritation at all this, we unconsciously divide the world into two columns: people who agree with us and people who do not; “People I Like,” and “People I Don't Like.” Instinctively we make the lists, and file them away. If we could lay hands on the ghostly files of twenty years and scan them through, we should find that the black-lists were not a catalogue of permanent and bitter hatreds, but a sort of Friendship Calendar. Many of our collisions, after all, were with the people to whom we came most near.
Almost every one wants to be easy to get along with. Some of us find it hard. In those discouraging moments when we have proved obnoxious to our friends, we are inclined to feel that a policy of isolation would be the most attractive thing in the world. But there are practical drawbacks even to isolation.
A blizzard had once drifted all the streets of our town. Our mother, with the true pioneering spirit, decided that she was going out. Our father was urging her to wait until the streets were cleared.
“Now, Endicott,” said our mother reasonably, “the snow-plough has been down, and there's a path.”
“But,” persisted Father, “the wind has drifted it all in again.” He paused while she put on her hat, and then he added earnestly, “You don't know how windy and drifted it really is. I just saw Mrs. Muldoon coming down the street, and she was going along single file, and making hard work of it too.”
The family was immensely taken with the picture of Mrs. Muldoon's ample figure going downtown in single-file formation; but, in spite of the jeers of his audience, our father still insisted that Mrs. Muldoon was going single file, and that she was making hard work of it at that.
Now and then there is an extreme individualist who yearns to go through life absolutely unmolested, single file. He is impatient of collisions, and collisions certainly do occur through one's proximity to one's kind. But even the most arrant individualist can hardly go single file all by himself—not without making hard work of it, at least. And even if such a thing were possible it would not be a natural or kindly way of life. Our hardy race has always valued the strength that comes from contacts of every sort and kind. We therefore keep up the hearty old custom of going through life in groups of families and associates and friends—even though, inadvertently, we sometimes do collide.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.