for me to sit down before doing so
themselves; and my contemporaries were accustomed to inquire jocularly
after my arteries. I was fifty! Another similar stretch of time and
there would be no I. Twenty years more--with ten years of physical
effectiveness if I were lucky! Thirty, and I would be useless to
everybody. Forty--I shuddered. Fifty, I would not be there. My room
would be vacant. Another face would be looking into the mirror.

Unexpectedly on this legitimate festival of my birth a profound
melancholy began to possess my spirit. I had lived. I had succeeded in
the eyes of my fellows and of the general public. I was married to a
charming woman. I had two marriageable daughters and a son who had
already entered on his career as a lawyer. I was prosperous. I had
amassed more than a comfortable fortune. And yet--

These things had all come, with a moderate amount of striving, as a
matter of course. Without them, undoubtedly I should be miserable; but
with them--with reputation, money, comfort, affection--was I really
happy? I was obliged to confess I was not. Some remark in Charles
Reade's Christie Johnstone came into my mind--not accurately, for I find
that I can no longer remember literally--to the effect that the only
happy man is he who, having from nothing achieved money, fame and power,
dies before discovering that they were not worth striving for.

I put to myself the question: _Were_ they worth striving for? Really, I
did not seem to be getting much satisfaction out of them. I began to be
worried. Was not this an attitude of age? Was I not an old man, perhaps,
regardless of my youthful face?

At any rate, it occurred to me sharply, as I had but a few more years of
effective life, did it not behoove me to pause and see, if I could, in
what direction I was going?--to "stop, look and listen"?--to take
account of stock?--to form an idea of just what I was worth physically,
mentally and morally?--to compute my assets and liabilities?--to find
out for myself by a calm and dispassionate examination whether or not I
was spiritually a bankrupt? That was the hideous thought which like a
deathmask suddenly leered at me from behind the arras of my mind--that I
counted for nothing--cared really for nothing! That when I died I should
have been but a hole in the water!

The previous evening I had taken my two distinctly blase daughters to
see a popular melodrama. The great audience that packed the theater to
the roof