her respects, the world lives on fiats, with
equally little interest in or comprehension of the levels above or below
them. And a surprising thing is that middle age is about as unable to
recall and realize youth as to anticipate age. Experience seems to go
for nothing in this matter.

They thought they noticed, too, that old people are more alike than
middle-aged people. There is something of the same narrowness and
similarity in the range of their tastes and feelings that is marked in
children. The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have
contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has
expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point
at the two ends and spread out in the middle. Middle age is the period
of most diversity, when individuality is most pronounced. The members of
the club observed with astonishment that, however affectionately we
may regard old persons, we no more think of becoming like them than
of becoming negroes. If we catch ourselves observing their senile
peculiarities, it is in a purely disinterested manner, with a complete
and genuine lack of any personal concern, as with a state to which we
are coming.

They could not help wondering if Henry were not right about people never
really growing old, but just changing from one personality to another.
They found the strange inability of one epoch to understand or
appreciate the others, hard to reconcile with the ordinary notion of a
persistent identity.

Before the end of the week, the occupation of their minds with the
subject of old age produced a singular effect. They began to regard
every event and feeling from a double standpoint, as present and as
past, as it appeared to them and as it would appear to an old person.

Wednesday evening came at last, and a little before the hour of eight,
five venerable figures, more or less shrouded, might have been seen
making their way from different parts of the village toward the Fellows
mansion. The families of the members of the club were necessarily in the
secret, and watched their exit with considerable laughter from behind
blinds. But to the rest of the villagers it has never ceased to be a
puzzle who those elderly strangers were who appeared that evening and
were never before or since visible. For once the Argus-eyed curiosity of
a Yankee village, compared with which French or Austrian police are easy
to baffle, was fairly eluded.

Eight o'