go on growing on its own account. The work, in fact, must have
been done.

"Take perhaps the only thing really worth doing in life," and Gerard
perceptibly saddened. "That is, marrying a woman you love, or I
should say _the_ woman, for you only really _love_ one woman--I'm
old-fashioned enough to think that,--well, I say, marrying the woman you
love, and bringing into the world that miracle of miracles,--a child
that shall be something of you and all her: that certainly is something
to have done before thirty, and not to be repeated, perhaps, more than
once before or after. She will want a boy like you, and you will have a
girl like her. That you may easily accomplish before thirty. Afterwards,
however, if you go on repeating each other, what do you do but blur the
individuality of the original masterpieces--though," pursued Gerard,
laughing, always ready to forget his original argument in the
seductiveness of an unexpected development of it, "though, after all, I
admit, there might be a temptation sometimes to improve upon the
originals. 'Agnes, my dear,' we might say, 'I'm not quite satisfied yet
with the shade of Eva's hair. It's nearly yours, but not quite. It's an
improvement on Anna's, whose eyes now are exactly yours. Eva's,
unfortunately, are not so faithful. I'm afraid we'll have to try again.'

"No, but seriously," he once more began, "for a really vital and
successful life there is no adequate employment of the faculties after
thirty, except, of course, in the repetition of former successes. No; I
even withdraw that,--not the repetition, only the conservation, the
feeding, of former successes. The success is in the creation. When a
world is once created, any fool can keep it spinning.

"Man's life is at least thirty years too long. Two score years is more
than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you'll
consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the
biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out. What, for
instance, did Keats and Shelley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all
of them long before they were forty,--Keats even long before he was
thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long
after? Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't even live to repeat themselves,
else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever;
for some repetitions, it is admitted, are welcome,--for instance, won't
you have a little more whisky?"

Hen