I exaggerate my own defects.  The reader must not take my own word for it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once hoped strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss.  Frostier heads than mine have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have imbibed new warmth, and been newly happy.  Life, however, it must be owned, has come to rather an idle pass with me.  Would my friends like to know what brought it thither?  There is one secret,—­I have concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape,—­one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless glance towards the future.  Shall I reveal it?  It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon,—­a man of the world, moreover, with these three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a crow’s-foot on each temple,—­an absurd thing ever to have happened, and quite the absurdest for an old bachelor, like me, to talk about.  But it rises to my throat; so let it come.

I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my story.  The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is entitled to this one word more.  As I write it, he will charitably suppose me to blush, and turn away my face: 

I—­I myself—­was in love—­with—­Priscilla!