AUGUST 443 



only because every individual case lias a different aspect, 

 but also because every ten years makes an entirely 

 different platform for our conduct of life. This seems 

 to me to be not sufficiently acknowledged. Once more I 

 return to a bundle of letters, to find one written by a 

 very old friend of our family, which talks of the decline 

 of life, from a man's point of view, in a way that is 

 individual and yet applicable to many : 



' I quite agree with you that it is very disagreeable to 

 grow old, and I have always thought that if I had been 

 Providence I would have made life begin with dotage 

 and decrepitude, and go on freshening and improving to 

 a primal death. But as I am a humble individual, and 

 not Providence, I make up my mind to things as they 

 are. Neither old women nor old men can hope to be 

 loved amorously or sentimentally, whatever other love 

 they may obtain. I confess that for long years the 

 ruling feeling of my life was a love of women, and a 

 desire to be loved by them, not exactly with a passionate 

 love, but with a love having in it some touch of amorous 

 sentiment. It was for this that I chiefly valued my 

 youth, my intellect, my celebrity, and whatever else I 

 possessed that might help me to it. And it was through 

 loving women, "not wisely but too well," that I made 

 myself unpopular both with men and women ; for I 

 cared nothing about men, and they saw it and resented 

 it, and yet women are in the hands of men, and he who 

 would be popular with women should take care first to 

 get men's good word. Even if I had taken count of 

 this in time, perhaps, I should not have taken heed to it, 

 for I was rather reckless and heedless in my youth, and 

 more disposed to trust to fortune than to take means, 

 and perhaps I had also a sort of latent consciousness 

 that what I desired was not good for me, and thus was 

 I, in the absence of better safeguards, 



