We learn to take small gains that offer, and to watch unmoved while splendid chances come to naught.

We learn to live life and to waste no energy in vain wishing that we had shuffled differently.

We learn even to marvel admiringly at the unobtrusive cunning which thwarts us of our dream's own--to wonder that cards ever should come right for any player in that maze of chances and faulty judgments.

And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.
As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat--one must be most careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found--it was not strange that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.
I had mused often upon it since that first night.

It seemed, curiously enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes, a girl's face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the face of another I had better reason to know.