A principal charm of the life at Fairly to him was that there was no one complaining.  No one looked reproach at him.  If a lady was pale and reserved, she did not seem to accuse him, and to require coaxing.  All faces here were as light as the flying moment, and did not carry the shadowy weariness of years, like that burdensome fair face in the London lodging-house, to which the Fates had terribly attached themselves.  So, he was gay.  He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and a bright one.  Young men easily fancy that they may do this, and that when the black volume is shut the tide is stopped.  Saying, “I was a fool,” they believe they have put an end to the foolishness.  What father teaches them that a human act once set in motion flows on for ever to the great account?  Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.  Comfortable Youth thinks otherwise.

The days at a well-ordered country-house, where a divining lady rules, speed to the measure of a waltz, in harmonious circles, dropping like crystals into the gulfs of Time, and appearing to write nothing in his book.  Not a single hinge of existence is heard to creak.  There is no after-dinner bill.  You are waited on, without being elbowed by the humanity of your attendants.  It is a civilized Arcadia.  Only, do not desire, that you may not envy.  Accept humbly what rights of citizenship are accorded to you upon entering.  Discard the passions when you cross the threshold.  To breathe and to swallow merely, are the duties which should prescribe your conduct; or, such is the swollen condition of the animal in this enchanted region, that the spirit of man becomes dangerously beset.

Edward breathed and swallowed, and never went beyond the prescription, save by talking.  No other junior could enter the library, without encountering the scorn of his elders; so he enjoyed the privilege of hearing all the scandal, and his natural cynicism was plentifully fed.  It was more of a school to him than he knew.

These veterans, in their arm-chairs, stripped the bloom from life, and showed it to be bare bones:  They took their wisdom for an experience of the past:  they were but giving their sensations in the present.  Not to perceive this, is Youth’s, error when it hears old gentlemen talking at their ease.

On the third morning of their stay at Fairly, Algernon came into Edward’s room with a letter in his hand.

“There! read that!” he said.  “It isn’t ill-luck; it’s infernal persecution!  What, on earth!—­why, I took a close cab to the station.  You saw me get out of it.  I’ll swear no creditor of mine knew I was leaving London.  My belief is that the fellows who give credit have spies about at every railway terminus in the kingdom.  They won’t give me three days’ peace.  It’s enough to disgust any man with civilized life; on my soul, it is!”

Edward glanced at the superscription of the letter.  “Not posted,” he remarked.