that is the most that
ought to be attempted. Perhaps the best way of all is to subside into
the genial and interested looker-on, to be ready to applaud the game
you cannot play, and to admire the dexterity you cannot rival.

What then, if any, are the gains that make up for the lack of youthful
prowess? They are, I can contentedly say, many and great. In the first
place, there is the loss of a quality which is productive of an
extraordinary amount of pain among the young, the quality of
self-consciousness. How often was one's peace of mind ruined by
gaucherie, by shyness, by the painful consciousness of having nothing
to say, and the still more painful consciousness of having said the
wrong thing in the wrong way! Of course, it was all immensely
exaggerated. If one went into chapel, for instance, with a straw hat,
which one had forgotten to remove, over a surplice, one had the feeling
for several days that it was written in letters of fire on every wall.
I was myself an ardent conversationalist in early years, and, with the
charming omniscience of youth, fancied that my opinion was far better
worth having than the opinions of Dons encrusted with pedantry and
prejudice. But if I found myself in the society of these petrified
persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender
opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered
at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep
generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would
be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected
by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions.
And then there was the crushing sense, at the conclusion of one of
these interviews, of having been put down as a tiresome and heavy young
man. I fully believed in my own liveliness and sprightliness, but it
seemed an impossible task to persuade my elders that these qualities
were there. A good-natured, elderly friend used at times to rally me
upon my shyness, and say that it all came from thinking too much about
myself. It was as useless as if one told a man with a toothache that it
was mere self-absorption that made him suffer. For I have no doubt that
the disease of self-consciousness is incident to intelligent youth.
Marie Bashkirtseff, in the terrible self-revealing journals which she
wrote, describes a visit that she paid to some one who had expressed an
interest in her and a desire to