in.
The fellow who does not read at fifty will take no pleasure in books at
seventy.

My club is full of dozens of melancholy examples of men who have
forgotten how to read. They have spent their entire lives perfecting the
purely mechanical aspects of their existences. The mind has practically
ceased to exist, so far as they are concerned. They have built marvelous
mansions, where every comfort is instantly furnished by contrivances as
complicated and accurate as the machinery of a modern warship. The doors
and windows open and close, the lights are turned on and off, and the
elevator stops--all automatically. If the temperature of a room rises
above a certain degree the heating apparatus shuts itself off; if it
drops too low something else happens to put it right again. The servants
are swift, silent and decorous. The food is perfection. Their motors
glide noiselessly to and fro. Their establishments run like fine
watches.

They have had to make money to achieve this mechanical perfection; they
have had no time for anything else during their active years. And, now
that those years are over, they have nothing to do. Their minds are
almost as undeveloped as those of professional pugilists. Dinners and
drinks, backgammon and billiards, the lightest opera, the trashiest
novels, the most sensational melodrama are the most elevating of their
leisure's activities. Read? Hunt? Farm? Not much! They sit behind the
plate-glass windows and bet on whether more limousines will go north
than south in the next ten minutes.

If you should ask one of them whether he had read some book that was
exciting discussion among educated people at the moment, he would
probably look at you blankly and, after remarking that he had never
cared for economics or history--as the case might be--inquire whether
you preferred a "Blossom" or a "Tornado." Poor vacuous old cocks! They
might be having a green and hearty old age, surrounded by a group of the
choicest spirits of all time.

Upstairs in the library there are easy-chairs within arm's reach of the
best fellows who ever lived--adventurers, story-tellers, novelists,
explorers, historians, rhymers, fighters, essayists, vagabonds and
general liars--Immortals, all of them.

You can take your pick and if he bores you send him packing without a
word of apology. They are good friends to grow old with--friends who in
hours of weariness, of depression or of gladness may be summoned at will
by those o