Our main temptation after all lies in the fact that we are so impatient of any delay or any uneasiness.  We are like the child who, when first confronted with suffering, cannot bear to believe in its existence, and who, if it is prolonged, cannot believe in the existence of anything else.  What we have rather to do is to face the problem strongly and courageously, to take into account the worst and feeblest possibilities of our nature, and yet not to overlook the fact that the worst and lowest specimen of humanity has a dim inkling of something higher and happier, to which he would attain if he knew how.

I had a little object-lesson a few days ago in the subject.  It was a Bank Holiday, and I walked pensively about the outskirts of a big town.  The streets were crowded with people of all sorts and sizes.  I confess that a profound melancholy was induced in me by the spectacle of the young of both sexes.  They were enjoying themselves, it is true, with all their might; and I could not help wondering why, as a rule, they should enjoy themselves so offensively.  The girls walked about, tittering and ogling, the young men were noisy, selfish, ill-mannered, enjoying nothing so much as the discomfiture of any passer-by.  They pushed each other into ditches, they tripped up a friend who passed on a bicycle, and all roared in concert at the rueful way in which he surveyed a muddy coat and torn trousers.  There seemed to be not the slightest idea among them of contributing to each other’s pleasure.  The point was to be amused at the expense of another, and to be securely obstreperous.

But among these there were lovers walking, faint and pale with mutual admiration; a young couple led along a hideous over-dressed child, and had no eyes for anything except its clumsy movements and fatuous questions.  Or an elderly couple strolled along, pleased and contented, with a married son and daughter.  The cure of the vile mirth of youth seemed after all to be love and the anxious care of other lives.

And thus indeed a gentle optimism did emerge, after all, from the tangle.  I felt that it was strange that there should be so much to breed dissatisfaction.  I struck out of the town, and soon was passing a mill in broad water-meadows, overhung by great elms; the grass was golden with buttercups, the foliage was rich upon the trees.  The water bubbled pleasantly in the great pool, and an old house thrust a pretty gable out over lilacs clubbed with purple bloom.  The beauty of the place was put to my lips, like a cup of the waters of comfort.  The sadness was the drift of human life out of sweet places such as this, into the town that overflowed the meadows with its avenues of mean houses, where the railway station, with its rows of stained trucks, its cindery floor, its smoking engines, buzzed and roared with life.