To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies.  You are precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years.  Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for telling me how you do it?  Instead of me talking to you, you ought to be talking to me.  Please come forward.  That you exist, I am convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my loss.  Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my companions in distress—­that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.

If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration.  It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments.  We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us.  We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires:  “O man, what hast thou done with thy youth?  What art thou doing with thine age?” You may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself.  True!

But there are degrees.  A man may desire to go to Mecca.  His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca.  He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate.  Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him.  But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton.

It is something to have left Brixton.  Most of us have not left Brixton.  We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook’s the price of a conducted tour.  And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.

If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do.  We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency.  A task sufficiently difficult!  A task which very few of us achieve!  A task often beyond our skill!  Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.

And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to do.