querable than grief. And so there flows into the gap the certainty
that one can make more of misadventures, of unpromising people, of
painful experiences, than one had ever hoped. It may not be, nay, it is
not, so eager, so full-blooded a spirit; but it is a serener, a more
interesting, a happier outlook.

And so, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, striking a balance of my
advantages and disadvantages, I am inclined to think that the good
points predominate. Of course there still remains the intensely human
instinct, which survives all the lectures of moralists, the desire to
eat one's cake and also to have it. One wants to keep the gains of
middle life and not to part with the glow of youth. "The tragedy of
growing old," says a brilliant writer, "is the remaining young;" that
is to say, that the spirit does not age as fast as the body. The
sorrows of life lie in the imagination, in the power to recall the good
days that have been and the old sprightly feelings; and in the power,
too, to forecast the slow overshadowing and decay of age. But Lord
Beaconsfield once said that the worst evil one has to endure is the
anticipation of the calamities that do not happen; and I am sure that
the thing to aim at is to live as far as possible in the day and for
the day. I do not mean in an epicurean fashion, by taking prodigally
all the pleasure that one can get, like a spendthrift of the happiness
that is meant to last a lifetime, but in the spirit of Newman's hymn--

"I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me."

Even now I find that I am gaining a certain power, instinctively, I
suppose, in making the most of the day and hour. In old days, if I had
a disagreeable engagement ahead of me, something to which I looked
forward with anxiety or dislike, I used to find that it poisoned my
cup. Now it is beginning to be the other way; and I find myself with a
heightened sense of pleasure in the quiet and peaceful days that have
to intervene before the fateful morning dawns. I used to awake in the
morning on the days that were still my own before the day which I
dreaded, and begin, in that agitated mood which used to accompany the
return of consciousness after sleep, when the mind is alert but
unbalanced, to anticipate the thing I feared, and feel that I could not
face it. Now I tend to awake and say to myself, "Well, at any rate I
have still to-day in my own hands;" and then the very day itself has