ion. It is a horrible experience which everybody is glad
to forget, and which nobody ever wants to repeat. It knows no zest. It
is a time of spiritual unrest, a chafing of the soul. Youth is cruel,
troubled, sensitive to futilities. Only childhood and middle-age can be
light-hearted about life: childhood because it doesn't understand,
middle-age because it does.

And a youth of poverty is, literally, hell. There is a canting phrase in
England to the effect that poverty is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet if
there is one country in the world where poverty is a thing to be
superlatively ashamed of, that country is England. There never was an
Englishman who wasn't ashamed of being poor. I myself had a youth of
hardship and battle: a youth in which I invaded the delectable countries
of Literature and Music, and lived sometimes ecstatically on a plane
many degrees above everyday life, and--was hungry. Now, looking back,
when I have, at any rate, enough to live upon and can procure anything I
want within reason; though I am no longer enthusiastic about Art or
Music or Letters, and have lost the sharp palate I had for these things;
yet, looking back, I know that those were utterly miserable days, and
that right now I am having the happiest time of my life. For, though I
don't very much want books and opera and etchings and wines and
liqueurs--still, if I want them I can have them at any moment. And that
sense of security is worth more than a thousand of the temperamental
ecstasies and agonies that are the appanage of hard-up youth.

At that time, fired by a small journalistic success, I insulted the
senior partner of the City firm which employed me at a wicked wage, and
took my departure. Things went well, for a time, and then went ill.
There were feverish paradings of Fleet Street, when I turned out vivid
paragraphs for the London Letter of a Northern daily, receiving half a
crown apiece. They were wonderful paragraphs. Things seemed to happen in
London every day unknown to other newspapers; and in the service of that
journal I was, by the look of it, like Sir Boyle Roche's bird, in five
places at once. But that stopped, and for some time I drifted, in a sort
of mental and physical stupor, all about highways and byways. I saw
naked life in big chunks. I dined in Elagabalian luxury at Lockhart's on
a small ditto and two thick 'uns, and a marine. I took midnight walks
under moons which--pardon the decadent adjectives--were pallid