What I like about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with the joy. Perhaps this theme rings so true because Bill himself had come to a point where he had settled for less, a place not in the first rank of playwrights along with O’Neill, Williams, and Miller but on an honorable sub-platform where—damn the praise, damn their prizes—the work would be its own reward; he realized that he’d find peace only if he sought goals within the reach of what talent he had and didn’t hope for miracles.