It was my ashes of roses, the music of my first love, its poignancies softened by time and memory into an ineffable, faint melody; it was the moon that drenched my bygone youth with wonder-light--a dream-face, exquisite as running water, unfolding flowers and those other sweets that poets try in vain to entangle in the meshes of word and rhythm.
This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden of familiar surprises.

All of which meant that I was a poor thing of clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that somewhere between him and God was the one woman, breathing and conscious, perhaps even longing.

More plainly, it meant that I was a man whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair.
Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt "the wrinkled spoils of age", my voice would waver ominously, and I should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing childish games of belief with some foolish dog.

I would be a village "character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past unromantically barren.
There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this.

But I fought them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing.
Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as an individual dog were suddenly revealed.