Yes; I flattered myself that I looked like a boy of thirty, and I felt like one—­except for things to be hereinafter noted—­and yet middle-aged men called me “sir” and waited 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 went wild, and my young ladies, infected in spite of themselves with the same enthusiasm, gave evidences of a quite ordinary variety of excitement; but I felt no thrill.  To me the heroine was but a painted dummy mechanically repeating the lines that some Jew had written for her as he puffed a reeking cigar in his rear office, and the villain but a popinjay with a black whisker stuck on with a bit of pitch.  Yet I grinned and clapped to deceive them, and agreed that it was the most inspiriting performance I had seen in years.