“I know,” Dave agreed. “It’s always that way. The thing you do with apparent ease because you have yourself under perfect carefree control, is just the thing that takes it out of you.”
By himself later, Dave recalled words of a great old poem:
“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
And walk with kings, nor lose the common touch,—”
“That,” he told himself, “is just what Cherry can do. And nothing can ever spoil her.”
If he had quoted from that same poem:
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same,—”
he would have been telling Cherry’s fortune, for Cherry was to meet with both Triumph and Disaster.