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for me to sit down before doing so themselves; and my contemporaries were accustomed to inquire jocularly after my arteries. I was fifty! Another similar stretch of time and there would be no I. Twenty years more--with ten years of physical effectiveness if I were lucky! Thirty, and I would be useless to everybody. Forty--I shuddered. Fifty, I would not be there. My room would be vacant. Another face would be looking into the mirror. Unexpectedly on this legitimate festival of my birth a profound melancholy began to possess my spirit. I had lived. I had succeeded in the eyes of my fellows and of the general public. I was married to a charming woman. I had two marriageable daughters and a son who had already entered on his career as a lawyer. I was prosperous. I had amassed more than a comfortable fortune. And yet-- These things had all come, with a moderate amount of striving, as a matter of course. Without them, undoubtedly I should be miserable; but with them--with reputation, money, comfort, affection--was I really happy? I was obliged to confess I was not. Some remark in Charles Reade's Christie Johnstone came into my mind--not accurately, for I find that I can no longer remember literally--to the effect that the only happy man is he who, having from nothing achieved money, fame and power, dies before discovering that they were not worth striving for. I put to myself the question: _Were_ they worth striving for? Really, I did not seem to be getting much satisfaction out of them. I began to be worried. Was not this an attitude of age? Was I not an old man, perhaps, regardless of my youthful face? At any rate, it occurred to me sharply, as I had but a few more years of effective life, did it not behoove me to pause and see, if I could, in what direction I was going?--to "stop, look and listen"?--to take account of stock?--to form an idea of just what I was worth physically, mentally and morally?--to compute my assets and liabilities?--to find out for myself by a calm and dispassionate examination whether or not I was spiritually a bankrupt? That was the hideous thought which like a deathmask suddenly leered at me from behind the arras of my mind--that I counted for nothing--cared really for nothing! That when I died I should have been but a hole in the water! The previous evening I had taken my two distinctly blase daughters to see a popular melodrama. The great audience that packed the theater to the roof
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