A Gentleman of Leisure by P. G. Wodehouse

Nevertheless, it was in a very exalted frame of mind that he dressed for dinner. It seemed to him that he had awakened from a sort of stupor. Life, so grey yesterday, now appeared full of colour and possibilities. Most men who, either from choice or necessity, have knocked about the world for any length of time are more or less fatalists. Jimmy was an optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on fate not as a blind dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but rather as a benevolent being with a pleasing bias in his favour. He had almost a Napoleonic faith in his star. At various periods of his life -- notably at the time when, as he had told Lord Dreever, he had breakfasted on birdseed -- he had been in uncommonly tight corners, but his luck had always extricated him.

It struck him that it would be an unthinkable piece of bad sportsmanship on Fate's part to see him through so much and then to abandon him just as he had arrived in sight of what was by far the biggest thing of his life. Of course, his view of what constituted the biggest thing in life had changed with the years. Every ridge of the Hill of Supreme Moments in turn had been mistaken by him for the summit; but this last, he felt instinctively, was genuine. For good or bad, Molly was woven into the texture of his life. In the stormy period of the early twenties he had thought the same of other girls, who were now mere memories as dim as those of figures in a half-forgotten play. In their case his convalescence had been temporarily painful, but brief. Force of will and an active life had worked the cure. He had merely braced himself up and firmly ejected them from his mind.