If life is a game, as Old Spencer insists in ch. 2, then what do you make of Jane Gallagher’s habit of keeping all of her kings in the back row when she played checkers with Holden? Assign some symbolic significance to her actions

in our power to make a world happy - to teach mankind the art of being so - to a character hitherto unknown - and to have, as it were, a new creation intrusted to our hands, are honors that command reflection, and can neither be too highly estimated,

the part where he says my friends