y youth
behind on the hollow-sounding boards of that jetty. No, there is nothing
to laugh at in a man of thirty-five leaving his youth behind. There are
men who have seen their own daughters married, and retain for themselves
the hearts of adventurous boys. From the formidable ramparts of half a
century they can leap down and frolic with the young fellows who for the
first time are in love, or seeing the world, or holding down a job, or
reading Balzac. I cannot compete with such men. Youth fills me with awe.
It is something I believe I had once, but I am not sure. I watch them
nowadays, with their unerring cruelty of instinct, their clear egotism,
their uncanny intuition and sophistication, and I wonder if I were ever
like that, a sort of callow and clever young god! I wonder, too, whether
a good deal of the modern misery and unhappiness isn't simply due to
women being at a loss, as it were, to know just what the new and
improved breed of young men want. All this talk of women themselves
becoming modern is so much flub-dub. Look at Mrs. Evans. She was, and
is, coeval with the Jurassic Period. And women are continually trying to
get back there. You may ask me how I know this, and I can only tell you
that I have an emotional conviction--the strongest conviction in the
world, born of the tremendous experience which was coming upon me.

"And the first thing which, you might say, certified my new status as a
grown-up human being, was my promise to go and see Captain Macedoine's
daughter. I mean I made that promise without a shadow of reservation. In
youth we hedge, we balk, we bilk, over and over again. Fidelity is
unattractive to us. We cannot see that to keep a promise made to a woman
is a species of spiritual strength. It may be a foolish promise made to
a worthless woman, but that is of no importance. In youth we go on
breaking away, breaking away, for one reason or another, until we have
not even faith in ourselves, until we lose sight of the essential nature
of true fidelity, which is a blind disregard of our own immediate well
being. And I was astonished, as I sat in that boat and floated away into
the gray void of the fog, with the girl, the shore, the sky, all gone,
that she had infected me with her romantic view of life. I had always
preserved a sort of semi-religious notion that love, for me personally
you know, was bound to be an affair of highly respectable and virtuous
character. I don't know why, I'm sure, but