AUGUST 433 



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, 



From social snares with ease 



Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please. 



' Youth is dead and gone at eight-and-twenty, and one 

 may mourn it for 'a year or two then ; but at thirty it is 

 time to rise and eat bread, and after fifty one no more 

 desires to be young than one desires to be the Archangel 

 Michael or Henry VIII. One does not desire it because 

 one cannot conceive it. The past is so long past that it 

 is past being a subject for regret ; and as to the future, one 

 has to look forward to losing one's eyes and ears and 

 brains and some of the powers of one's stomach, but one 

 has not the loss of youth to look forward to, and that is 

 one source of sadness removed and to me it used to be, 

 thirty or forty years ago, a source of sadness ; for I was 



FF 



