am ashamed of myself, I am ashamed. Perhaps I have no right to go on seeking. A man seeks when he is young, does he not? When he has come to my age, which is the same as yours, he ought to have found and he has no right to go on seeking. And, if he hasn't found, then he looks back upon his life as one colossal failure, as one huge mistake—mistake upon mistake—and then things become hopeless, hopeless, hopeless . . ."
She was silent . . .
She thought of her own life, her small feminine life—the life of a small soul that had not thought and had not felt, that was only just beginning to feel and only just beginning at rare intervals to think—and she saw her own small life also wasting the years in mistake upon mistake.
"Oh," he said, in a voice filled with longing, "to have found what one might have gone on seeking for years! To have found, when young, happiness . . . for one's self . . . and for others! Oh, to be young, to be once more young! . . . And then to seek . . . and then to find when young . . . and to meet when young . . . and to be happy when young and to make others—everybody!—happy! . . . To be young, oh, to be young!"
"But you are not old," she said. "You are in the prime of life."
"I hate that phrase," he said, gloomily. "The prime of life occurs at my age in people who do not
