one's addiction, in
growing older, to allowing a supreme force to one's earlier, even one's
earliest, estimates of physical felicity; or in other words that of the
felt impulse to leave the palm for good looks to those who have reached
out to it through the medium of our own history. If the conditions
_grow_ better for them why then should we have almost the habit of
thinking better of our handsome folk dead than of our living?--and even
to the very point of not resenting on the part of others similarly
affected the wail of wonder as to what has strangely "become" of the
happy types _d'antan_. I dodge that inquiry just now--we may meet it
again; noting simply the fact that "old" pretenders to the particular
crown I speak of--and in the sense especially of the pretension made
rather for than by them--offered to my eyes a greater interest than the
new, whom I was ready enough to take for granted, as one for the most
part easily could; belonging as it exactly did on the other hand to the
interest of their elders that _this_ couldn't be so taken. That was just
the attraction of the latter claim--that the grounds of it had to be
made out, puzzled out verily on occasion, but that when they were
recognised they had a force all their own. One would have liked to be
able to clear the distinction between the new and the old of all
ambiguity--explain, that is, how little the superficially invidious term
was sometimes noted as having in common with the elderly: so much was it
a clear light held up to the question that truly beautiful persons might
be old without being elderly. Their juniors couldn't be new,
unfortunately, without being youthful--unfortunately because the fact of
youth, so far from dispelling ambiguity, positively introduced it. One
made up one's mind thus that the only sure specimens were, and had to
be, those acquainted with time, and with whom time, on its side, was
acquainted; those in fine who had borne the test and still looked at it
face to face. These were of one's own period of course--one looked at
_them_ face to, face; one blessedly hadn't to consider them by hearsay
or to refer to any portrait of them for proof: indeed in presence of the
resisting, the gained, cases one found one's self practically averse to
old facts or old traditions of portraiture, accompanied by no matter
what names.

All of which leads by an avenue I trust not unduly majestic up to that
hour of contemplation during which I could see