fretted over.  And a man who, out of sheer inability to part from boyhood, clings desperately and with apoplectic puffings to these things is an essentially grotesque figure.  To listen to young men discussing one of these my belated contemporaries, and to hear one enforcing on another the amusement to be gained from watching the old buffer’s manoeuvres, is a lesson against undue youthfulness.  One can indeed give amusement without loss of dignity, by being open to being induced to join in such things occasionally in an elderly way, without any attempt to disguise deficiencies.  But that is the most that ought to be attempted.  Perhaps the best way of all is to subside into the genial and interested looker-on, to be ready to applaud the game you cannot play, and to admire the dexterity you cannot rival.

What then, if any, are the gains that make up for the lack of youthful prowess?  They are, I can contentedly say, many and great.  In the first place, there is the loss of a quality which is productive of an extraordinary amount of pain among the young, the quality of self-consciousness.  How often was one’s peace of mind ruined by gaucherie, by shyness, by the painful consciousness of having nothing to say, and the still more painful consciousness of having said the wrong thing in the wrong way!  Of course, it was all immensely exaggerated.  If one went into chapel, for instance, with a straw hat, which one had forgotten to remove, over a surplice, one had the feeling for several days that it was written in letters of fire on every wall.  I was myself an ardent conversationalist in early years, and, with the charming omniscience of youth, fancied that my opinion was far better worth having than the opinions of Dons encrusted with pedantry and prejudice.  But if I found myself in the society of these petrified persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance.  Or some deep generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions.  And then there was the crushing sense, at the conclusion of one of these interviews, of having been put down as a tiresome and heavy young man.  I fully believed in my own liveliness and sprightliness, but it seemed an impossible task to persuade my elders that these qualities were there.  A good-natured, elderly friend used at times to rally me upon my shyness, and say that it all came from thinking too much about myself.  It was as useless as if one told a man with a toothache that it was mere self-absorption that made him suffer.  For I have no doubt that the disease of self-consciousness is incident to intelligent youth.  Marie Bashkirtseff, in the terrible self-revealing journals which she wrote, describes a visit that she paid to some one who had expressed an interest in her and a desire to see her.  She says that as she passed the threshold of the room she breathed a prayer, “O God, make me worth seeing!” How often used one to desire to make an impression, to make oneself felt and appreciated!