oth beautiful and possible, because one knows of households
where it is so, and where it grows up naturally and easily enough. I
know households of both kinds--where on the one hand the standard is
ambitious and mean, where the inmates calculate everything with a view
to success, or rather to producing an impression of success; and there
all talk and intercourse is an unreal thing, not the outflow of natural
interests and pleasant tastes, but a sham culture and a refinement that
is only pursued because it is the right sort of surface to present to
the world. One submits to it with boredom, one leaves it with relief.
They have got the right people together, they have shown that they can
command their attendance; it is all ceremony and waste.

And then I know households where one sees in the books, the pictures,
the glances, the gestures, the movements of the inmates, a sort of
grace and delicacy which comes of really caring about things that are
beautiful and fine. Sincere things are simply said, humour bubbles up
and breaks in laughter; one feels that light is thrown on a hundred
topics and facts and personalities. The whole of life then becomes a
garden teeming with strange and wonderful secrets, and influences that
flash and radiate, passing on into some mysterious and fragrant gloom.
Everything there seems charged with significance and charm; there are
no pretences--there are preferences, prejudices if you will; but there
is tolerance and sympathy, and a desire to see the point of view of
others. The effect of such an atmosphere is to set one wondering how
one has contrived to miss the sense of so much that is beautiful and
interesting in life, and sends one away longing to perceive more, and
determined if possible to interpret life more truly and more graciously.

X

FEARS OF AGE

And then age creeps on; and that brings fears of its own, and fears
that are all the more intolerable because they are not definite fears
at all, merely a loss of nervous vigour, which attaches itself to the
most trivial detail and magnifies it into an insuperable difficulty. A
friend of mine who was growing old once confided to me that foreign
travel, which used to be such a delight to him, was now getting
burdensome. "It is all right when I have once started," he said, "but
for days before I am the prey of all kinds of apprehensions." "What
sort of apprehensions?" I said. He laughed, and replied, "Well, it is
almost too absur