s fender. You may see physical proof of
this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior of two people, one
young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why should so many old
ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to precipitate
themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to dream yet
one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the young men who
would willingly wait years for them?

The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the
painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age.
Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with
ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no
fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant
occupation in the aeons before it, or that its emotions or volitions
shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is
immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine an
eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that
doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things
which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly
with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of
waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living
doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless
not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is
unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to
age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age can get back to the
long, long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our old friend may
accuse us of proposing the most impossible of paradoxes when we invite
him to take refuge from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing
endeavor to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the forecast
of youth in eternity. We think that the error of his impatience, his
despair with the state he has come to here, is largely if not wholly
through his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up old in
some other being, but young, and that the capacity of long, long
thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The
restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression
of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and
that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader
prefers another image