to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he loathes them.
He used to like going out to dinner, above all things; and he was fond
of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such
delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly he enjoyed
travel with all its necessary concomitants. It amused him to check his
baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself
in new rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the
domestication in diners had a charm which was apparently perennial; a
trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean voyage was ecstasy. The
succession of strange faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and
there was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did not give
him release from self and form a true recreation. The theatre does not
amuse him now, though the time has been, and lately, for the curtain,
when it rose on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to
hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he once rejoiced in
all its feats; performing elephants could not bore him, nor acts of
horsemanship stale its infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly
when the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed
with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils.

These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any
powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change from
youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He
is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or the teeth to
gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than ten, and rest
refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill things, he
could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his gun on his
shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether or no it
would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in the groves
and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the breast
of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a delicious sense of
her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If he rests a little
longer than he once used, he is much more rested when he rises from his
repose.

His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is not
interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish to
repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit wh