And now (to speak of less grave matters) when all I had to say about Growing Old seems very poor, do I see it rightly?  Do I see it as my reader would always have seen it?  Or has it faded into falsehood, as well as into distance and dimness?  When I look back, and see my thoughts as trash, is it because they are trash and no better?  When I look back, and see Ailsa as a cloud, is it because it is a cloud and nothing more?  Or is it, as I have already suggested, that in one respect the analogy between the moral and the material fails.

I am going to write Concerning Disappointment and Success.  In the days when I studied metaphysics, I should have objected to that title, inasmuch as the antithesis is imperfect between the two things named in it.  Disappointment and Success are not properly antithetic; Failure and Success are.  Disappointment is the feeling caused by failure, and caused also by other things besides failure.  Failure is the thing; disappointment is the feeling caused by the thing; while success is the thing, and not the feeling.  But such minute points apart, the title I have chosen brings out best the subject about which I wish to write.  And a very wide subject it is; and one of universal interest.

I suppose that no one will dispute the fact that in this world there are such things as disappoititment and success.  I do not mean merely that each man’s lot has its share of both; I mean that there are some men whose life on the whole is a failure, and that there are others whose life on the whole is a success.  You and I, my reader, know better than to think that life is a lottery; but those who think it a lottery, must see that there are human beings who draw the prizes, and others who draw the blanks.  I believe in Luck, and Ill Luck, as facts; of course I do not believe the theory which common consent builds upon these facts.  There is, of course, no such thing as chance; this world is driven with far too tight a rein to permit of anything whatsoever falling out in a way properly fortuitous.  But it cannot be denied that there are persona with whom everything goes well, and other persons with whom everything goes ill.  There are people who invariably win at what are called games of chance.  There are people who invariably lose.  You remember when Sydney Smith lay on his deathbed, how he suddenly startled the watchers by it, by breaking a long silence with a sentence from one of his sermons, repeated in a deep, solemn voice, strange from the dying man:  His life had been successful at last; but success had come late; and how much of disappointment he had known!  And though he had tried to bear up cheerily under his early cares, they had sunk in deep.  ‘We speak of life as a journey,’ he said, ’but how differently is that journey performed!  Some are borne along their path in luxury and ease; while some must walk it with naked feet, mangled and bleeding.’