ears, like that burdensome fair face in the London
lodging-house, to which the Fates had terribly attached themselves. So,
he was gay. He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and
a bright one. Young men easily fancy that they may do this, and that
when the black volume is shut the tide is stopped. Saying, "I was a
fool," they believe they have put an end to the foolishness. What father
teaches them that a human act once set in motion flows on for ever to
the great account? Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we
are. Comfortable Youth thinks otherwise.

The days at a well-ordered country-house, where a divining lady rules,
speed to the measure of a waltz, in harmonious circles, dropping like
crystals into the gulfs of Time, and appearing to write nothing in his
book. Not a single hinge of existence is heard to creak. There is no
after-dinner bill. You are waited on, without being elbowed by the
humanity of your attendants. It is a civilized Arcadia. Only, do not
desire, that you may not envy. Accept humbly what rights of citizenship
are accorded to you upon entering. Discard the passions when you cross
the threshold. To breathe and to swallow merely, are the duties which
should prescribe your conduct; or, such is the swollen condition of
the animal in this enchanted region, that the spirit of man becomes
dangerously beset.

Edward breathed and swallowed, and never went beyond the prescription,
save by talking. No other junior could enter the library, without
encountering the scorn of his elders; so he enjoyed the privilege of
hearing all the scandal, and his natural cynicism was plentifully fed.
It was more of a school to him than he knew.

These veterans, in their arm-chairs, stripped the bloom from life, and
showed it to be bare bones: They took their wisdom for an experience of
the past: they were but giving their sensations in the present. Not to
perceive this, is Youth's, error when it hears old gentlemen talking at
their ease.

On the third morning of their stay at Fairly, Algernon came into
Edward's room with a letter in his hand.

"There! read that!" he said. "It isn't ill-luck; it's infernal
persecution! What, on earth!--why, I took a close cab to the station.
You saw me get out of it. I'll swear no creditor of mine knew I was
leaving London. My belief is that the fellows who give credit have spies
about at every railway terminus in the kingdom. They won't give me three
days' pe